Scanning for the home user

Epson has announced a new scanner aimed squarely at the home user. The A4 size Perfection 1260 has four quick start buttons - scan to print, scan to Web, scan to email and scan to application, designed to simplify the process. It scans with an optical resolution of 1200x2400 dpi and 48-bit colour depth. ...more

Broadband boost sees a new connection every 10 seconds

BT is boasting of an increased broadband take-up - a new connection every ten seconds, according to BT Wholesale. The company has passed the four million mark for wholesale broadband customers. In other words, the service that ISPs resell to end-users. ...more

RIPA order relaid

Last summer's RIPA order - an addendum to RIPA which would have given hundreds of government bodies access to communications data - has been resurrected after undergoing what the governments describes as a 'radical revision.' The order as it stood last summer gave hundreds of bodies - from the police force to parish councils - access to communications data: data on electronic communications (although not the content of them). It met with national disdain, and David Blunkett swiftly withdrew it for further consultation. ...more

Toshiba opts for AMD chips in budget laptops

Toshiba has announced that it is to begin buying microprocessors for some of its laptop models from AMD, ending its exclusive ties with Intel. The world's fourth-largest laptop PC maker said that it expects to put AMD processors in about 20 per cent of the notebooks it sells in the US and Europe. The move follows an announcement last year by Dell, the world's second-largest PC maker that had been procuring microprocessors only from Intel for more than two decades, that it would begin using chips from AMD. ...more

Intel boosts speech-enabled telephony

Voice controlled PDAs to ease mobile Internet use Intel has enhanced its Computer Telephony (CT) Application Development Environment (ADE) to help developers build speech-enabled telephony applications. It might not sound exciting yet, but read on. As the PDA/phone hybrid looks set to become the standard fayre for the mobile device fanatic, questions are being asked as to how much you can actually do on a device with such a small screen. ...more