National Semi to power 'free' MSN computers

National Semiconductor has announced that it is to provide the computing power behind a new range of Internet access computers, known as MSN Companions. The devices are manufactured by a company called eMachines, and will provide access to the Web, e-mail and MSN services such as online forums and communities. The MSN Companion is soon to be available from eMachines' partners, and costs $349. ...more

Thirty-three exchanges plug into 8Mbps broadband

UK Online has announced that its 8Mbps ADSL broadband service is now available through 33 exchanges in the UK. The 33 exchanges comprise Bridgeton, Bristol West, Chelmsford, Chesterfield, Crawley, Dimsdale, East Kilbride, Edgbaston, Fountainbridge, Hackney, Hemel Hempstead, Hounslow, Isleworth, Kingsland Green, Kingswood, Leith, Longton, Luton, Newbury, Milton Keynes, Morley, Moorgate, Orpington, Pudsey, Ponders End, Romford, St Albans, Sale, Uxbridge, Wakefield, Walton on Thames, Warrington and Waverley. More exchanges will be added to the list next year. ...more

Nokia and Vodafone announce joint Java standards partnership

Nokia and Vodafone have announced a new initiative designed to simplify the development of future Java applications for mobile phones. The mobile service architecture initiative has already been given Sun's blessing as well as other operators and device manufactures such as Orange, Siemens, Sony Ericsson, Sun Microsystems and T-Mobile International. The initiative will create its specifications within the Java Community Process (JCP), which is the closest Java gets to an open standards body. ...more

mp3 goes Pro

Today's the day that Coding Technologies, subsidiary of Thomson Multimedia and the Fraunhofer Institute, launches the big brother to mp3 - mp3PRO. It claims to be able to compress audio more than twice as efficiently as the standard mp3 codec, using two channels. It's backwards compatible to a point, although standard players will only recognise one track, and so the reproduced audio may sound worse than standard mp3 quality. ...more

AMD wins over Dell for desktops

AMD has confirmed a new deal with Dell that will see the Texan company shipping desktop machines powered by AMD as well as some Opteron-based servers. The Intel-rival has officially announced that Dell will offer AMD processor-based Dimension desktop PCs by September. Dell will be also be shipping both 4P (quad-core) and 2P (dual-core) AMD Opteron-based servers by the end of 2006. ...more