Freedomland comes to the UK

Interactive TV company Freedomland hits our shores today, undercutting the opposition such as British Sky Broadcasting, ONdigital and Bush, with a ?6.99 monthly fee. Using set-top technology from French company Netgem, Freedomland offers Net access, email, fax, picture in picture, voice email and SMS is on its way. ...more

IBM demo Bluetooth with Linux

The Bluetooth Developers Conference is well underway in San Jose, California and IBM has been showing off a watch-like Bluetooth device. The company has already showed off the watch-sized device that runs the Linux operating system earlier in the year and now IBM has unveiled an add-on module that brings Bluetooth connectivity to the unit. In a demo, the watch was seen to communicate with a laptop with a PC card Bluetooth module, with characters typed on the laptop appearing on the screen of the watch. ...more

BT Openworld renews waiving of ADSL activation fee

BT Openworld has extended its offer on reduced broadband setup costs. BT Broadband and BT Openworld's Home 500 Plug & Go service will continue to waive activation fees. Also included in the package is a £50 ADSL modem offer and, for Openworld Home 500 Plug & Go customers, an extra £10 off orders placed online. ...more

Toshiba, SanDisk promising new era of gigabyte memory chips

Toshiba and SanDisk are promising a new era of gigabyte memory chips following the unveiling of an 8Gb NAND flash memory chip at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) 2005 in San Francisco. Built with 70nm process technology, the new NAND flash memory is based on multi-level cell technology that allows two bits of data to be stored in one memory cell and hence doubling the memory capacity. A combination of burst mode techniques and high read bandwidth delivers a write speed of 6MB/sec and a maximum read speed of 60MB/sec, which, Toshiba and SanDisk say, is 40 per cent faster than today's designs. ...more

One billion and counting

Approximately one billion PCs have now shipped worldwide, according to industry analyst Gartner. This landmark figure for the dominance of personal computers is projected from the combined desktop and laptop shipments of PC manufacturers worldwide. Approximate figures they may be - with the count starting from the mid-70s - but April 2002 was the likely shipping date for that special billionth PC. ...more