Belgian telco exits music downloads

Less than a week after the music industry began talking of an inevitable shakedown of the online market, Belgium's leading telecommunications firm has decided to abandon its own downloads service and throw its lot in with Apple and iTunes. Belgacom's Skynet Music Club has been running for three years and in 2005 sold 1.5 million songs, in addition to providing free video clips and concerts to its ADSL subscribers. ...more

Motorola goes text mad!

Following on from our report about the popularity of SMS messaging, it seems that one manufacturer has listened to the consumer and designed the phone that they want. If you can think back to that news report, the survey said that people want more phones with QWERTY keyboards and bigger screens. Well lo and behold, three days later Motorola announces its new V. ...more

Panasonic to program your telly, over broadband

Panasonic is putting products on shop shelves that let you record TV via a mobile phone. On 10 April, Panasonic - aka Matsushita - will launch the DY-NET2 broadband receiver in Japan that connects set-top boxes with hard disk drives to the Internet via ADSL broadband. You can then use a mobile phone to see an online EPG (electronic program guide) and set up the DY-NET2 to tell the set top device to record your day's viewing. ...more

GeForce FX off the blocks

nVidia brings photo-realism to the desktop with GeForce FX. From both sides of the Atlantic, nVidia yesterday launched its next generation of graphics processor: here in Lodon and at the Comdex industry show in Las Vegas. Rather than a small step forward to GeForce 5, the company is claiming a giant leap with the moniker GeForce FX. ...more

Microsoft publishes new guide to deploying Service Pack 2

Microsoft has created a new guide to allay fears for those who are deploying XP service pack 2. With SP2 raising the security bar for Windows, increasingly problems have been found with applications that assume a less rigorous regime. According to the Microsoft website, the Application Compatibility Testing and Mitigation Guide for Windows XP Service Pack 2 'will assist IT professionals to test and mitigate application compatibility issues arising from these more stringent security technologies. ...more