Vodafone unveiled on Tuesday a new handset from Sharp that includes a number of features including a VGA (video graphics array) resolution screen and face-recognition security system. The 904SH handset will go on sale in Japan on April. Its VGA screen with 480 pixels by 640 pixels. Security system authenticates that the face of the [...]

Samsung Electronics officialy announed the release of an internal (SH-B022A) and external (SE-B026A) Blu-Ray burner for April 2006. The drives will offer users the ability to store up to 50GB onto a dual layer disc. Compatible with legacy DVD and CD formats, the drives offer HD video burning and reading at a 2x speed (9MB/s). [...]

Symantec announced the release of a new backup software, the Norton Save & Restore which targets home users.

Microsoft is set to launch in the US the beta version of its new Windows Live Search page, which uses the same behind-the-scenes technology as MSN Search but will eventually become the company’s sole search offering. “In the future there will be one search experience — when we come out of beta (with Windows Live [...]

Authors who sign up with digitisation programs run by companies such as Google or Amazon may be unwittingly sacrificing some of their rights, a media lawyer has warned. “I wouldn’t want to see people giving one company hundreds of thousands of books and thinking it doesn’t matter, when in fact it does,” Adrian Laing, a [...]

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) announced that it is filing a lawsuit against Web sites associated with movie piracy, including several sites that serve as search engines but do not act as distributors. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act protects search engines from getting sued for association to swapped works, but only if the [...]

Digital audio systems developer Olive Media Products on Wednesday introduced its OPUS, a high-end CD player with a 400GB hard drive that can hold up to 1,100 CDs in a lossless format. The $2,999 device features four Burr-Brown 24-bit/192 kHz digital-to-analog converters with 8X oversampling, and the ability to create playlists once CDs are ripped [...]

As part of its ongoing antitrust case against Intel, Advanced Micro Devices served Skype with a subpoena demanding documents related to its deal to make one feature in Skype 2.0 available exclusively to Intel users. The legal filing joins a long list of subpoenas AMD has filed in search of evidence that Intel has used [...]

Bloggers on the go will soon have a new tool to help them keep their blogs up to date. Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications announced a deal with Google to integrate the search company’s Blogger and Web search features into Sony Ericsson mobile phones. Using software pre-loaded on the phones, subscribers of Blogger.com will be able [...]

The so-called fourth generation of optical storage format has been highly promoted lately, and considering that neither the Blu-Ray nor the HD DVD has become a de facto standard for HD content, Optware and Inphase Technologies offer prospects for terrabytes of storage. Currently, there are two competitive storage technologies based on Holography: The HVD (Holographic [...]

A Texas lawyer named Kenneth Nash owns a patent on a method for detecting pirated software by assigning each program a unique ID and verifying it over the Internet. Nash sued Microsoft over its product activation program and lost when a judge in Houston ruled against him. On Thursday, he took his patent claim before [...]

Showing that it’s more than a little interested in enabling people to handle office tasks over the Internet, Google said on Thursday that it has snapped up Writely, a maker of a Web-based word processor. The acquisition was noted on both Writely’s main Web site and on a blog run by Writely co-founder Claudia Carpenter. [...]

The MEDIA-TECH Association will partner with the HVD Alliance for a seminar presentation on Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD) at the upcoming MEDIA-TECH Expo. Experts from the field will introduce this new optical storage technology offering capacities of up to 3.9 terabyte. Hideyoshi Horimai, Chief Technology Office of Optware Corporation, the inventor of HVD will also [...]

New MP3 players with all that empty space – wouldn’t it be great if they came full of music when you bought them? Well, Dixons are doing just that – but before you cancel your download subscription, it might not be the music you were hoping for. The electrical retailer will load free music on [...]

Most Americans get their news from television, while newspapers continue to cede readership to the Internet, according to a new survey of 2,800 consumers from Burlingame-based research and advisory firm Outsell. Seventy-one percent of respondents said that they rely on network, cable and satellite TV as primary or secondary sources of national news, while only [...]