If you’re finding the relentless march of technology to be a little too pacey for your liking, perhaps you might like to seek solace with some reassuringly retro handset attachments for your mobile phone and home PC.
Propeller SF
Looking like the kind of thing used by Dixon of Dock Green to despatch police squad cars to break-ins by bungling burglars, the Propeller SF is styled like an old fashioned telephone handset, complete with an old-school curly lead.
The hefty handset plugs into any mobile with a hands-free socket, letting yesteryear yearners recreate their own comforting patch of 1940s nostalgia whenever they take a call.
We know they look daft, but let’s be honest – do they look any sillier than a Bluetooth earpiece stuck on your lughole?
The handset is available from http://www.propeller-sf.com/ for $85 (£46, €67).
Get hip with Hulger historical handsets
One of the pioneers in this retro handset lark is Hulger, who released a similar design in 2003.
The company were originally known as Pokia, but Danish telecom heavyweights Nokia, alarmed at the perceived similarity of their names, flexed their mighty corporate muscle and forced them to change their name.
Hulger now offer a range of five retro handsets, two of which come with a cordless Bluetooth configuration.
They look pretty attractive to our eyes, but all that style and panache doesn’t come cheap, with the Bluetooth models starting from £86.00 ($160, €125) and the wired models setting you back from £40 upwards.
All the phones work with most mobiles and can be hooked up to PCs for VoIP calling with their £8 Y*Cable.
Brits are going wild for the latest technological innovations according to market research firm GfK in its biannual ‘UK Technology Barometer report.’
Not surprisingly, smartphones continue to set the cash tills ringing with a big increase in sales, while single-function PDAs are carrying on their slow decline, with sales slumping by 38.3%.
Korean technology company KTF Technologies have unveiled a teensy-weensy phone, which is “smaller then a lipstick.”
KTF Technologies, are the handset-making subsidiary of Korea’s second biggest wireless carrier, KTF, and the company has said that it intends to market the mini-sized slider, EV-K130 from this week, priced at around 370,000 won (approx £210, €305).
We always thought that computer gaming was the near-exclusive domain of incommunicado male teenagers, but a new study by Parks Associates has found that 59% of all U.S. consumers who play games on a mobile phone are of the lady persuasion.
Predictably, the study found that it’s still the men who want to blast aliens, blow up things and take part in role-playing games, while women prefer less frenetic mobile gaming activities, like online trivia and card games.
John Barrett, director of research at Parks Associates reckoned that women are the foundation of the gaming market, adding that, “as an industry, we need to cater to their preferences.”
As you know, we *heart* nice, new shiny gadgets and we love to sit on the (sometimes uncomfortable) cutting edge of technology.
With the Treo just about everything works. 
Moreover, the interface is fast and responsive and although Palm’s idea of multi-tasking is simply to close down whatever you’re doing and start up the next program (while remembering all the settings) it doesn’t suffer from the gradual slowdown to a crawl that constantly blighted our Windows experience.
Palm Treo 650
Some of the most compelling games are often the simplest, and games don’t get much more basic than the age-old game of Battleships.
If you miss, you get a splashy sound (and quite possibly the derision of your chum across the room) and if you hit the target you get a gratifying kaboom (with the option to shout and jeer at your opponent’s misery).
Our opinion
Yo! Boom Boom! AOL’s produced a book* new ‘Action Sports On Demand’ website designed for skateboarders, snowboarders and other action sports athletes.
Taking a sniff around the suitably “yoot” style website, we clicked on the ‘About Us’ section, only to be greeted with one of those really annoying, pretentious dictionary-style definitions:
Spots! Yeah! Rad!
When it comes to World Cup football Web coverage in the UK, the BBC isn’t just dribbling past its rivals – it’s positively crushing past them, according to figures released by Nielsen NetRatings.
Interestingly, the Sporting Life site proved the ‘stickiest’ with punters spending the longest time on the site (an average of 36 mins each).
Channel 4 has today launched a new broadband Simulcast service, making their live TV schedule available online for viewing, for free.
Channel 4 has, however, said that it is negotiating with US studios to add their content at a later date.
Appearing in a thundercloud of enthusiasm, Channel 4 CEO Andy Duncan was on-beam and on-message and rapidly hit evangelical overdrive, describing the Web transmission as an opportunity “to build on what Channel 4 has always done – stimulate, infuriate, debate, create,” adding that he didn’t see the digital revolution as an attack on Channel 4’s power as a public broadcaster, but as a “fantastic opportunity,”
Smaller than a pack of cards and packed with enough whizz-bang functionality to keep a hyperactive cokehead entertained for hours, MobiBox’s new MP410 multimedia recorder and player packs a big punch for the price.
The MP410 also features a pair of folding out speakers for added ‘Tony Blair’ appeal, and comes with a pull-out stand for desk viewing.
Interface 2 in 1 MiniUSB (USB 2.0/power in)