Pretensions finally got round to downloading the demo version of Guitar Hero 3 Mobile from the Windows Mobile site. The good news is that it works fine on her LG KS20 Windows Mobile 6 phone (those familiar with WM6 know that not all apps work on all machines) and P had great fun struggling to play Santana's Black Magic Woman on her dinky phone. 

For those not familiar with the game, Guitar Hero was originally developed for the Playstation in 2005 and enables you to play out your rock god fantasies. The original PS2 version came with a guitar-shaped controller that brought new meaning to air-guitar players lives everywhere. You fly along 5 giant frets and little onscreen coloured buttons indicate when you need to press and hold a fret. Do it correctly and you play a funky Black Magic Woman, do it badly and your horrible plinks and plunks get booed by a virtual audience. Guitar Hero proved tremendously popular, appealing to bedroom rockstars worldwide and spawned 2 sequels and numerous spinoffs.

Not being a console nerd, P managed to avoid GH until it came to the Windows Mobile platform. The mobile version is apparently as close to the original as possible, but has 3 frets rather than 5 so that it can work with a phone/PDA D-pad or touch-screen. The game features MP3 sound versions of rock classics such as Red Hot Chilli Peppers Suck My Kiss, Kiss's Strutter and Black Sabbath's Paranoid. It's great fun, as good hi-fi sound (obviously this depends on your phone) and is tremendously satisfying when you manage to pull off a decent rendition of a number. P can easily imagine annoying a supermarket queue with guitar riff fun.

The game is not completely bug-free, at least on P's platform, as too much fooling at the menu stage sometimes resulted in the sound turning off and P could not get it to come back on without restarting. However, it worked about 85% of the time, which is OK for a non-essential app. 

US provider Verizon claim that more than 250,000 songs a day are played on the GH3 mobile platform, so give it a go and see what you think! Apparently, GH4 will be dedicated to Aerosmith so that's something fans can look forward to.