In the general rush of all mobile phone companies desperately try not to get sidelined, Vodafone Italy have just announced a tie-up with Italian broadband provider, FastWeb.
Customers will be be able to use their normal Vodafone services on their mobiles, make mobile voice calls to fixed line phones at fixed rates whilst at home and have access to Fastweb’s broadband network, which covers approximately half the population of Italy at speeds of up to 20Mbps.
FastWeb bill themselves as “Italy’s leading alternative broadband provider,” and with under a million customers (874,300), they’ll benefit from having Vodafone selling their services from Vodafone shops around Italy as well as to their current 24m cellular customers.
If mobile companies don’t start offering fixed line services, they feel they’ll lose customers to people who do, with the single bill for all communications being the strongest pull.
We recently reported that O2 Germany has gone the same route offering DSL, Vodafone UK tied up with BT and Vodafone Germany launched similar services on 1 Sept.
Great oceans of dribbling saliva could be seen around the photography desk at Digi-Lifestyle towers today as we caught sight of the eagerly awaited Leica M8 Digital Rangefinder camera. 
Leica used some Teutonic cunning to get around the problem of corner vignetting on older lenses by employing a smaller sensor, offset microlenses and software correction optimised for the lens in use.
Rangies aren’t for everyone though. The lack of autofocus and limited availability of long telephoto lenses means that you’ll need an experienced hand to grab action/sports photographs, and there’s no hand-holding ‘scene’ modes on this puppy. 
Inside is the three-position shutter release button (prime exposure/ exposure lock/shutter release) with an old fashioned shutter speed dial to the left (we like these). 
As with previous Leica designs, the camera is clear and easy to understand, simple and graceful throughout. And eye-wateringly expensive. 
YouTube is continuing to get attention for the content it has on it. Not this time for alleged copyright violations, but for a young girl who has been appearing in videos about the trial and tribulations of her life. Her moniker? 
What raised our suspicions? It had always been shot on a video camera, high above a standard Web cam and edited in a self-consciously amateur fashion. The subjects she spoke about appeared just too ideal for the majority-male YouTube – geeky with relationship questions. Of course she was also very attractive. It was also strange that the music that was used in the tracks was always fully credited. We wondered if Bree was eventually going to start talking about products. 
It appears that some people who it also didn’t quite ring true for, 
Palm have revealed details about their eagerly awaited Treo 750v, which will be made available on the Vodafone network in the UK. 
In line with Palm’s weird aversion to all things Wi-Fi in their Treos, hotspot lovers will have to invest in a separate Wi-Fi SDIO card. 
Memory has been boosted to 128MB plus 60MB user flash memory, with the device sharing the same 1.3 megapixel digital camera and the excellent full QWERTY keyboard with 5-way navigator of its predecessors. 
Adobe has announced the latest upgrade to their Photoshop Elements consumer photo editing software with Version 5 of the popular, consumer-friendly package adding more tools to help photographers organise, edit and share their pictures. 
Powerful imaging tools
New tools for version 5 include a useful black-and-white conversion tool, a long overdue “Adjust Colour Curves” tool for fine-tuning images and a handy controls for correcting camera lens distortion. 
Premiere Elements 3.0
Apple has for once pre-announced a new product, codenamed iTV (which is unlikely to be the final name as they’d get sued in the UK for a start). 
In the UK, the iTunes music store was closed all day yesterday for refurbishment, with a black screen just saying ‘Showtime.’ At about 6pm (UK time) Steve Jobs announced why. There’s a slew of new/updated iPods and more content on the store as well as version 7 of iTunes for Mac and Windows (more on this later). 
Movies (and video from the iTunes store) are now stored in 640 x 480 format. 
Both the Nano and iPod video now have search features so that albums can be searched for etc., using the click wheel (with on-screen letters and search criteria). Gapless playback is a new feature, so songs can be played continuously without the normal two second wait between songs. There’s no beat matching yet, but maybe that’s Apple’s next enhancement so DJ’s will be out of a job. 
Hyundai Telematic Korea have announced their way-posh Roadbank HTMS 18800 DMB navigator, an ultra slim, in-car navigation system with a hefty 7 inch touch screen. 
As well as offering navigation tools, the Roadbank comes stuffed with multimedia widgets, doubling up as a high end media console with support for movie playback formats like WMV9, MPEG-1/2/4, DivX, Xvi and H.264. It can also display digital photos too. 
The Roadbank HTMS 18800 DMB runs on Windows CE 5.0 and comes with 64 MB of Nand Flash with a SD card slot providing memory expansion options. 
Fujifilm have announced the FinePix A700 compact digital camera, a shiny new addition to their entry-level ‘A’ series camera range. 
Unlike Fujifilm’s more upmarket offerings, their famous high ISO settings are nowhere to be found on the A700, which can only offer a comparatively restricted 100 to 400 ISO sensitivity with no anti-shake. 
Fujifilm FinePix A700 specifications
iTunes 7 is now available for download. The indexing has been improved, as has navigation by re-organising the Library and other indexes that normally appear on the left hand side. If iTunes is linked to an account on the iTunes store, it can now download artwork for any music on your system. Searching is also easier, as both music and video can be searched by viewing the artwork and then seeing what’s available in say that album. 
All movie and video content is now stored in 640 x 480 format.