Carphone’s pre-tax profits have crashed ten per cent to £123.1million, with the company’s financial buttocks feeling the lash of their £80.5million free broadband launch.
The launch just wasn’t just painful for Carphone, with punters galore feeling the weals of a truly rubbish service, being forced to wait months on end while the company struggled hopelessly to catch up with demand.
(more…)
We felt the pocket-throbbing love big time for the Pocket PC version of the file utility application Resco Explorer, so when we heard that the Palm version had enjoyed a major upgrade, we were hot to hotsync.
A veritable Swiss army knife of file management functionality, Resco Explorer is a must-have app for advanced Palm users who like to get under the hood of their handhelds and take command of their files.
(more…)
China Mobile has launched its own IM service, Fetion. It offers PC and mobile phone messaging at zero charge, even from mobiles, with just the GPRS data charges being paid for. Users will be able to IM between mobiles running the service; PC to PC and PC to mobile. Currently there’s no monthly charge, although they haven’t ruled out of possibility of it.
China has a self-declared battle against porn going on at the moment and on the back of that Liu Yunshan, head of the Communist Party of China Central Committee’s Publicity Department – a big cheese – has put forward the idea of “building a Web culture with Chinese characteristics.”
Following on from the recent upgrades to the MacBook, Apple has upgraded their Pro laptop range to run the latest Intel Core 2 Duo processors, otherwise known as Santa Rosa, at 2.4GHz.
Apple are claiming that it will run apps like Final Cut Pro 6 and Logic Pro 7, 50% faster that the original MacBook Pro with Core Duo – something that will be very tempting to many. With the internal graphics card now upgraded to the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT, the graphics will also display 50% speed faster.
(more…)
The month of May saw a month-long crackdown on Internet porn in China. The combined forces of 10 ministries lead the closing of 300 domestic porn and ‘salacious’ sites being closed down.
Li Baozhong, head of the official press watchdog and deputy director of the national anti-porn and anti-piracy office also reported that they’d blocked 4,000 links to porn sites and filtered out more than 10,000 ‘online porn games’ – we’ve no idea what these porn games could be.
There was a large assemblage of HTC bigwigs in town for the global launch of their new Touch smartphone.
A sleek little fella sporting GSM/GPRS/EDGE, Tri-band radio (900, 1800 & &900), Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0, the Touch launches in two flavours: “elegant soft black” and the truly daft sounding, “alluring wasabi green.”
The big news about the phone – hyperbolically described as, “a watershed as important as the introduction of the mouse” – is HTC’s new TouchFLO system, which lets users navigate screens by sweeping their finger across the phone.
(more…)
Ramping up a ton of pressure on the Palm’s new Foleo is VIA’s new NanoBook Ultra Mobile Device, an ultraportable laptop with a claimed retail price hovering around the ‘dead cheap’ price band at just $600.
Sure, the thing looks like it grew from an ugly acorn, rose to the top of the ugly tree and then hit just about every ugly branch on the way down before landing in a pile of ugly dung, but the specs sure look pretty for such a bargain basement device.
(more…)
The DSL Forum today announced that the total number of DSL connections worldwide has exceeded 200 million at the World Broadband Forum in Beijing.
It’s estimated that this significant milestone was passed in April this year (2007), less than a year since the announcement of the passing of the 150m level.
An astonishing 855,000 handsets are flushed away every year in the UK, totting up to an annual £342 million’s worth of phones flying around the u-bend.
The rather startling figure comes from the price comparison and switching service, SimplySwitch, who claim that 4.5m handsets are lost or damaged every year, with many enjoying a rather bizarre demise.
It seems that phones are particularly prone to falling down the loo as a result of falling out of pockets or being knocked off the toilet roll holder (or, we expect, slipping out of the hands of drunk blokes feebly failing to multitask after a skinful of Super-lager).
(more…)