As I understand most that still use their Minitels use them as a digital phonebook next to their old phones. I mean, If you have inputed tons of numbers in to any device and it works reasonably you won't change easily.
I also heard many farmers are still using it to trade cattle or watch weather forecasts of their region. I wonder how they will handle the end of the Minitel.
They will still have Teletext on their TV's which provides a lot of the same information (though only one way).
For those not familiar with Teletext, here is an online portal as an example: http://www.rtbf.be/services/teletexte/ - some teletext services even offer chatting via SMS messages, which then show up on the TV screen.
yeah weather forcasts must be great compared to e.g. a newspaper but inferior to a computer of course. Simple internet machines have a clear place in society, thats been shown again and again from minitel to cheap mobile phones in the third world...
