Microsoft makes new bid for mobile phone dominance

Microsoft is making another bid for the mobile phone market with the announcement of a new Windows Mobile based reference platform codenamed Peabody. The product was announced at the 3GSM World Congress 2005 alongside co-developer, the Singapore based Flextronics. The Peabody is being touted as a high volume, low priced device with sufficient flexibility so that a wide range of models can be built from the same reference platform. ...more

UK games chart: Pro Evolution Soccer 4 shoots to the top of the league

Football fans are known as a fickle crowd, and affiliations have flipped for this week's games chart: Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer 4 nutmegs FIFA 2005 to go top of the rankings. With EA Sports's FIFA 2005 slipping to number two, the top five is completed by Activision's Tony Hawk's Underground 2, climbing from seven to three, Microsoft's role-playing Fable stumbles from two to four, and EA's Burnout 3: Takedown has burnt out and broken down and remains at number five. Notable climbers this week include the DreamWorks spin-off Shark Tale (which climbs into the top twenty at number twelve in its second week), Crash Twinsanity (up to 14 from 25, also in its second week) and the venerable Sonic Heroes (up to 16 from 26 in its 36th week in the charts). ...more

LiSA v3.0 speaks of new mail

A new version of LiSA Speaking Assistant sees a boxed edition of the product being made available in the UK through the distributor SoftWide. LiSA v3.0 is designed to humanise your interaction with email, taking the guess work out of the content of new messages. ...more

Gibe-D and Lovgate-B worm their way into our consciousness

Starting the week with a couple of virus alerts, Sophos is warning about the Lovgate-B and the Gibe-D worms. The anti-virus company reports that it has already received several reports of Lovgate-B in 'the wild', ie the world outside computer virus laboratories. The worm is very similar to Lovgate-A. ...more

Parents and teachers warned about 'social networking'

Parents and teachers are to be given lessons on the potential dangers of 'social networking' sites such as MySpace , Facebook and Bebo. The recently formed Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) is looking to invite a cross-section of young adults, parents, teachers and online industry representatives to the events to be held the week beginning the 17 July. Social networking among older children and teenagers has become immensely popular in the past few years with millions of people logging in to add their profiles and meet new people. ...more