Mobiles are safe, claims report

Using a cellular phone does not increase a person's risk of cancer, according to a broad study released on Tuesday involving more than 400,000 Danish cellular telephone users. A team of researchers used data on the entire population of Denmark to determine that neither short- nor long-term use of cellular phones, also called mobile phones, was linked to a greater risk of tumours of the brain and nervous system, salivary gland or eyes, leukaemia or cancer overall. It is estimated that more than 2 billion people worldwide use cellular phones. ...more

Panasonic to ship Blu-ray drives next spring

Panasonic has announced that it will ship Blu-ray devices and media as early as Spring 2006. The subsidiary of Matasushita will introduce Blu-ray Disc (BD) drives for notebooks and desktops that will be able to write and read single- and dual-layer BDs as well as all types of recordable DVDs and CDs. The drives will be accompanied by the new non-cartridge BDs (bare disc) with storage capacities of 25 GB and 50 GB. ...more

Gender gap extends to the Web

It would seem that the gender gap extends to the Web according to a new survey that looked at the way that men and women respond to different website designs. According to the researchers at the Glamorgan University Business School, both the content, as you might expect, and the design of a site will determine whether it is chiefly visited by men or women. It seems that men prefer sites designed by men, while women prefer a woman's hand. ...more

Psion should quit PDA market say investors

Psion's investors have begged the firm to get out of the handheld market before it's pushed out by Palm and Handspring. The British PDA manufacturer and software developer took a blow last week when Motorola pulled out of a planned partnership to produce Internet devices. It's now thought that Psion will make a loss from its hardware manufacturing division. ...more

Amnesty International dials up mobile donations

Amnesty International is to introduce a mobile payment system called LUUP - 'a digital wallet' - so that users can make donations via their phones. In doing so, not only will it be easy for people to make donations, says Amnesty, it will also enable the human rights organisation to receive up to 15 per cent more of the money than via PSMS methods such as text. The UK arm of Amnesty ruled out premium rate text messages for donors as it felt it would be too costly as network operators took a slice of the pie and users were constrained by a maximum donation limit of ?4. ...more