The PDA watch is three years late

Almost three years after it was first unveiled, the PDA watch has finally gone on sale in the UK, albeit in a somewhat improved form. The Abacus Wrist PDA runs the PalmOS accessed through a backlit 160x160 mono display with an interface that can be customised by the user. HotSync via InfraRed is supported for both Mac OS X and Windows. ...more

Mobile music worth $9.3 billion in four years

The mobile music market is expected to ring up $9.3 billion worth of revenues by 2009 according to a survey by Juniper Research. Most of the cash will come from ringtones and realtones that have already established themselves as money spinners for the music business. ...more

French government considers switch to Linux

The French government is considering a move to Linux in a bid to stem its public spending and avoid breaking the three per cent of GDP EU limit for the third year running. According to Reuters, France's public sector shells out nearly ?200mn on office programs alone. But ministers reckon they can halve the software bill by moving to Open Source software. ...more

Apple denies iPod nano design defect

Apple has denied reports that there is a manufacturing defect with the iPod nano although it conceded that a small number of the music players have been affected by a 'minor issue'. Incidences of scratching and damaged LCDs have been widely reported, based on anecdotal evidence garnered from Apple's support forums and one particularly vocal complainant. 'This is a real but minor issue involving a vendor quality problem in a small number of units,' Apple said. ...more

Key open-source code passes muster

Analysis of the source code for key open-source projects has shown fewer than 29 'defects' in every 100,000 lines of code. Analysis of the LAMP stack - the Linux platform, Apache web server, MySQL database and Perl, PHP or Python scripting languages - showed that the commonly used open-source building blocks were well below the average for some 32 open-source projects scrutinised by Coverity. These included the likes of Samba, gcc, Gnome and FreeBSD. ...more