Colour screens drive global handset sales

Worldwide handset sales grew 6 per cent to reach 423.4 million units last year, boosted by replacement purchases of feature-packed mobile phones, according to a research report by Dataquest, a unit of Gartner. Fourth-quarter sales grew 14 per cent from a year earlier to 122. ...more

NBC woos YouTube

The phenomenal popularity of the video-sharing website YouTube has attracted the approval of NBC. The American TV broadcaster will now use the site to run promotional videos and other clips. Using a dedicated channel on YouTube, NBC will plug forthcoming content and could also air clips from old shows and special behind-the-scenes footage, reports the BBC. ...more

Compaq served with a $60m lawsuit

PC market leader Compaq has been served with a $60 million lawsuit, alleging patent infringements, which could also threaten Dell, HP and Apple. Six companies and an American college, Columbia University, have filed two suits, one in the US District Court in Delaware, and one in Germany, demanding that Compaq stop selling PCs which they claim use unlicensed MPEG 2 compression technology. The disputed MPEG 2 technology is used to decompress digital video accessed from DVD drives that ship with some Compaq PCs. ...more

Apple's Intel-ready OS X on a par with Power PC-based range

The version of OS X that Apple is developing in preparation for its transition to Intel hardware has caught up with the publicly available version for its Power PC-based Macs. OSx86 Project reports that: 'This marks the first time that Apple has released a copy of the OS for the Developer Transition Kits which is identical to the PPC version.' The website adds that this reflects the change in emphasis within Apple's engineering resources toward the Intel (x86) version of OS X. ...more

Almost half SMEs are virus lazy

Survey shows 42 per cent of SMEs don't update virus protection more often than weekly. A survey from Sophos reveals that 42 per cent of SME businesses and nearly a third of large businesses leave themselves open to attack by failing to update antivirus software more regularly than once a week. The survey, in which Sophos polled 4,500 administrators from companies of all sizes from across the globe, reveals that with 150 new viruses detected - some of them spreading in minutes - companies are leaving themselves unnecessarily vulnerable to attack. ...more