EU comments suggest iPod 'monopoly' may be OK after all

Questions raised by an official at the European Commission indicates that the body could be softening on the need for competition authorities to regulate the iPod. Some critics have called for measures to force Apple to make the music it sells on its online iTunes music store compatible with MP3 music players, other than its own iPods. 'Before we jump in to regulate competition on the market it is worth asking whether competition is actually harmed,' the Commission's director general for competition, Philip Lowe, said at an antitrust conference in Munich, Germany. ...more

Ericsson takes lid off digital pen

The ChatPen from Ericsson will enable users to order products from catalogues by beaming the information straight to a Bluetooth-enabled GPRS phone. The device works by using a scanner that will detect an almost invisible dot pattern printed on paper. But the ChatPen can also double as an input device for mobile phones, letting the user write out SMS messages straight to a mobile phone, PC or PDA (or any other device that has Bluetooth capability). ...more

Mobile phone turns web server

Researchers at Nokia have successfully installed and run a Web server on a mobile phone. Johan Wikman and Ferenc Dosa began the project after realising the modern mobile phones have processing power equivalent to or even greater than that on the earliest Web servers and that there is no reason why people could not create and maintain their own personal mobile websites. Rather than write the server from scratch, Wikman and Dosa exploited the fact that the phone's Symbian OS has a 'Posix' layer that provides, in their words, 'a fair amount of typical Unix functionality'. ...more

Price change means new winner in PC Pro lab test

Increased memory prices have caused Evesham to hike the price of its Axis 1900+, the Mesh XP 1800+ GTi2 is now the official winner. Due to a further increase in the price of DDR memory, evesham.com has been forced into raising the price of the Evesham Axis 1900+ by ?50. ...more

PalmSource unveils its first Linux operating system

PalmSource has unveiled the first Linux version of the its operating system for smartphones and mobile devices. Now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Japanese company Access, PalmSource has dropped the Palm OS label in favour of the less-catchy Access Linux Platform (ALP). Designed to be an open platform that will support existing Palm OS applications, ALP includes a standard Linux kernel version 2. ...more