3G at the mercy of WiFi

The welfare of 3G's future will suffer from the success of WiFi Network operators are turning to the more immediate services of rolling out WiFi hot-spots, rather than rushing out 3G to capitalise on the enormous fees paid for the licences. At yesterday's Mobile Working Forum in London, Dave Curl, head of PR at TDK said: '3G technology is not going to be around for a few years yet, by which time wireless will have cherry picked the best applications.' And wireless hot-spots still have some time to pick the best of the crop according to Curl who doesn't expect to see 'a meaningful choice of 3G suppliers for another four to five years'. ...more

Transmeta's second-coming for Crusoe chips

Astro chip to ignite mobile turf wars? Transmeta is set to fight back with its latest generation of the power-saving Crusoe chip, the company revealed at the Comdex industry event in Las Vegas. The Astro will be the first of Transmeta's TM 8000 line of mobile processors. It will be a step along from the company's Crusoe TM 5000 series as it can handle longer instruction sets - eight per cycle, as opposed to the standard four per clock cycle of the current crop of mobile chips. ...more

Nokia adds wireless authoring tools to GoLive

Nokia has released a wireless authoring module for Adobe GoLive 6 that allows GoLive users to create Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) Web content to be viewed on Nokia mobile phones. MMS content can contain audio, images and video in addition to text. According to Jouko Hayrynen, VP of Forum Nokia, 'The merging of rich media and wireless devices is a vital component of Nokia's strategy and new standards such as MMS mean mobile users will have access to increasingly richer personalised content regardless of time and place. ...more

Usability and accessibility issues dog councils' online efforts

Barking and Dagenham only site to gain top rating in survey by the Society of IT Management. Of the 468 local authority websites across the UK, just Barking and Dagenham has achieved an excellent rating in a survey by the Society of IT Management (Socitm). The study graded every local authority website on their content, accessibility and level of usage. ...more

Apple cuts Cube prices

Apple has cut the price of the 500 MHz Cube from ?1599 to ?1399. The company cut the price of the 450 MHz machine in the New Year. It has also added a new high-end machine to the range, but as yet this machine is only available in the US. ...more