Imagine having all the tools you’d need to work as efficiently as possible from virtually anywhere. Not just at the office. Not just at home. But from the road, on the train, or by the pool. And not just with email, phone, web browsing and instant messaging. But with GPS for mapping and turn-by-turn directions, storage space for your large files and a long-lasting, high-capacity battery.

Then imagine having all the tools you’d need to do things you want to do. Like staying connected to the people who matter most to you. Kicking back with the music you love. Watching clips you’ve downloaded, or playing games while you’ve got a few minutes to spare.

Now imagine doing all this with one sleek and performance-driven smartphone.

The BlackBerry® 8800 is the stylish way to get things done. Packed with powerful capabilities, yet incredibly compact and slim - it combines a stylish design with a premium finish. It also features a large, sharp screen that brings colors to life, whether you’re indoors or out: its built-in light-sensing technology automatically adjusts screen and keypad brightness. Sleek, elegant and performance-driven, this is a smartphone you’ll always want to show off.

The BlackBerry 8800 mobile phone has the following features:

• Bluetooth

• WAP

• Faster data with GPRS

• Music player

• Polyphonic ringtones

• Vibrating alert

• Voice dialling

• Speakerphone

• World phone (Quadband)

Britons are sitting on £23bn worth of electrical items which they no longer use, according to research.

Personal finance website Fool said each household has around £375 worth of unwanted but usable gadgets gathering dust in cupboards and attics.

A survey of 2,000 people found that one in five (18 per cent) were upgrading such items less than every two years.

As a result of digital television, nearly half (41 per cent) of those surveyed said they owned a video/DVD player they no longer used. The mobile revolution has also meant that one third of people have a mobile stored away in a cupboard.

Young people were found to be the biggest culprits with just over a quarter of 18-24 year olds buying the latest high-tech items to keep up with current trends. Men were also twice as likely as women to upgrade gadgets.

Fool blamed purchasing habits on the hype that surrounds new technologies when they first come into the market.

David Kuo, the company’s head of personal finance, said: “Often it can be better to bide your time until the euphoria surrounding the next must-have gadget dies down. The only must-haves you need are long-term financial goals to keep you from being distracted by short-term temptations.”

Waste Watch an environmental charity agreed. It estimated that around one million of tonnes of electronics were discarded every year.

Sam Jarvis, a representative for the charity, said: “We all have old mobile phones and redundant VHS machines around the house that we no longer use.

“The best thing we can do is to go for quality rather than quantity. It is much better to buy things that will last instead of constantly having to replace items that may look nice, but do not have a long lifespan.”

Jarvis also advised consumers to check with their council to see what materials were accepted for recycling at the public tip.

However, according to figures by Fool, some gadgets do not lose their value. For example, a Nintendo Wii is still estimated to cost the same price as it did this time last year. Therefore if recycling or giving gadgets away is not really something that appeals, selling them on Ebay or through specialist gadget sites such as Buysellgadget can also be a good way to get some money back.

Ofcom has set out plans to upgrade the hugely popular free-to-air digital TV service Freeview to make room for high definition (HD) channels to benefit the consumer and the economy.

Ofcom said that under its proposal, the service would be able to offer HD channels without needing additional radio spectrum from as early as 2009.

It predicts that the upgrade could bring benefits to the economy worth between 4 billion and 6 billion pounds over 25 years.

The transition to HDTV has been called a landmark move for the industry, similar to the shift from black and white to colour, and terrestrial broadcasters want to be able to compete with the sharply improved TV picture offered by pay-TV firms BSkyB and Virgin Media.

They had called on the government and Ofcom to reserve some of the highly sought after spectrum that will be freed up from the switchover to be used to carry HD channels on Freeview, in a bid to prevent a national “HD Divide” between those who can and those who can’t watch TV in HD.

But on Tuesday the country’s four main broadcasters, the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Five, said they could in fact produce the service with the currently available resources. Ofcom has said it intends to auction the released spectrum off to the highest bidder.

Ed Richards, Chief Executive of Ofcom, said the proposal to upgrade Digital Terrestrial Television, or Freeview, represented a major opportunity to build on its success with wider, richer and more varied services, including the potential for HDTV.

“We look forward to hearing the views of viewers and from right across the industry,” he said.

Ofcom said it would ask the broadcasters to come up with individual suggestions for how they would use the extra capacity in the hope that competition will result in higher standards.

Ofcom said the upgrade could roll out across the country from 2009 and result in four HD channels by 2012.

Users of Apple’s iPhone could be surfing the net at high speed as early as next May, according to a report in Spanish newspaper El Pais.

Mobile software developer SevenClick claims in the article that Telefónica, Spain’s biggest mobile operator, anticipates a May launch in Spain for the hotly awaited 3G iPhone.

The unconfirmed report arose after discussions within Telefónica in response to an enquiry about the Spanish launch of the 3G handset.

Telefónica, the parent company of Apple’s UK network partner O2, will make the 3G phone available throughout Spain, according to the report.

The overall number of broadband users in the UK continues to rise, but market watchers revealed today that the rate of growth of new subscriptions is falling rapidly.

Point Topic said that total UK broadband subscriptions will reach about 21 million by the end of 2012, comprising 19 million consumer lines and two million business lines.

The current downward trend in the growth rate of net additions is not just a blip but shows the pattern for the future, the analyst company forecasts.

About 330,000 and 550,000 consumer broadband lines were added in the middle two quarters of 2007 respectively, the lowest numbers since 2003. This is barely half the growth achieved in the previous two quarters, according to Point Topic.

The third quarter saw a slight improvement. Almost 600,000 business and consumer broadband lines were added which was better than projected.

The increase was due to good performance by the main broadband operators - Sky, BT Retail, Orange, Carphone Warehouse and Virgin Media - which added 660,000 lines while smaller competitors shared net losses of over 60,000 lines.

“A primary reason for the current slowdown in the market is the shrinking size of the remaining pool of dial-up users ready to be converted to broadband, ” Point Topic stated.

“Potential users are also put off by the widely reported problems in getting a broadband connection up and running, and controversy over the gap between promised and actual speeds.”

One driver of steady growth in the consumer sector will be demographic advance. As people grow older, they will carry their internet habits with them into older age groups.

This trend will contribute to about a one per cent reduction of the number of non-user households each year. Another factor spreading appeal of new applications will be social networking.

One key factor in Point Topic’s forecast is how quickly homes and businesses which are still without the internet will get online.

“We forecast that about four per cent of the remaining households without internet access will convert each year,” said Point Topic chief analyst Tim Johnson.

“That is roughly the average for the past two years as a whole, but much better than in the past few quarters, so it implies improved performance by the industry.”

Point Topic estimates that about 73 per cent of homes and 85 per cent of business premises will have a broadband connection by the end of 2012.

In the business market, which is expected to have lower barriers to take-up than the consumer sector, about 6.5 per cent of the remaining business premises without broadband will get connected each year.

A surge is seen in the market of broad band users in the UK, to some extent, owing to the availability of the high technological advancements. The same has impacted the sales of cameras and printer models that could be used with broadband communication only. Some of the manufactures have even shifted their resources towards more of the compatible products. This has led to the new line of brother printers and the most advanced and multi functional designs of canon printers.

Samsung has announced a new digital photo frame that can be connected to a computer and used as an extra display.

The SPF-83V connects to the computer via USB, so a second video output is not needed. Samsung, which already produces USB-connected monitors for business users, told journalists in Suwon, South Korea, that the small display would be useful for applications such as instant messaging.

The frame can connect to wireless networks, and can automatically download and display photographs from sites that provide updates in the RSS format used to update many blogs and podcasts.

It is also unusual in having a traditionally shaped screen. Unlike most digital frames, which use a widescreen shape, its 800×600 pixel display will show photographs from the vast majority of digital cameras without the need for cropping.

Samsung expects digital photo frames to become increasingly popular over the next few years, with a predicted market of 4 million frames worldwide in 2007 growing to 12.4 million in 2010.

Yun Ho Ha, Senior Vice President of Samsung’s Visual Display Division, said that photo frames had an “emotional appeal” as “they allow people to share their photos containing valuable moments with friends and families”.

No price was announced, but the SPF-83V is expected to cost around £170.

The Nokia N82 is now available according to specialist mobile phone site GSM Arena.

The release, earlier than expected, is timed perfectly to hit the Christmas market.
The specification is nothing short of complete. You get connection via EDGE, WLAN, 3G, HSDPA, Bluetooth and USB.
Storage in the form of 100MB onboard memory is further expandable with MicroSD cards.
You get a 5MP camera with Carl Zeiss optics and Xenon flash. A secondary CIF camera is forward facing for video calls. Video capture up to 30 FPS, MPEG4 encoded should see an excellent quality of footage.
The display is 2.4″ 16M color QVGA TFT and if this is not enough the handset utilises a TV-out port.

An Auto-Rotational screen, as on the iPhone, is a nice touch and should work well with the onboard A-GPS/Maps function.
Other appealing features include a 3.5mm headphone jack, FM radio and 225 hour standby time.

The Quad Band GSM handset will run Symbian OS 9.2

Cost is expected to be around £375 (SIM FREE) and includes a 2GB MicroSD card. Quite reasonably priced when you consider the onboard spec.

Search engine Magic Taxi is hoping to attract new users by making a promise to plant trees to help reduce carbon footprints.

Each time someone uses the search engine to browse the web or shop online, Magic Taxi will give 50 per cent of the revenue it receives through advertising and commission referrals to the Woodland Trust.

A spokesman for Magictaxi.com said: “The next six weeks are the busiest for online searching and shopping. According to the Centre for Economic and Business Research, the average British family will spend over £448 on food, drink, toys and other gifts this Christmas.

“If this was spent through Magic Taxi it would plant five trees and help to offset one tonne of carbon. We chose to partner with the Woodland Trust as we wanted the trees purchased to be grown within the UK, so that we could be confident they would reach full maturity and our users could visit the woodland being created.

The Magic Taxi internet toolbar will also give users tips about what they can do to reduce their own carbon footprints by being more energy efficient. The user can set Magictaxi.com either as a home page or a toolbar.

 PopVent.com. The only site that pays it’s members for simply being members. Although Myspace, Friendster, Facebook, YouTube and countless other Social Networking sites are very popular they don’t take care of their members at all!

Think about this: Most social networking sites earn upwards of $20 million dollars per month. And how much of that goes back to the user….NONE!

There are a handful of networking sites that actually share their advertising revenue such as Yuwie, MyLot and a handful of others. The only problem with these sites is that in order to qualify for a portion of their ad sharing revenue you have to send SUBSTANTIAL traffic to their sites.

This is where PopVent.com comes in and absolutely revolutionizes the Social Networking phenomenon. Once you sign up as a Revenue Sharing Affiliate, you are GUARANTEED TO MAKE MONEY FROM ANYONE THAT SIGNS UP THROUGH YOUR REFERRAL LINK!

How much can you earn?

The chart below assumes you refer 3 people that become affiliates, and those 3 people refer 3, then those refer 3, through 10 levels, and each referral gets 3 referrals (this is automatically done when someone joins)

Please remember, even if your referrals DO NOT sign on as Affiliates, you still receive a commission for their membership fee!

To join the revenue sharing program immediately, click here

IBM’s Blue Gene has retained its title as the world’s fastest supercomputer in the new Top 500 rankings.

Blue Gene/L has held the accolade since November 2004 and is now capable of performing at a rate of 478.2 teraflops, or 478.2 trillion calculations per second.

The supercomputer is based at California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where it is used for complicated simulations such as the movement of particles during nuclear fallout.

Second place was awarded to IBM’s follow-up computer, Blue Gene/P, one of four new entries in the top five machines. The third spot was taken by the SGI Altix ICE 8200 at the New Mexico Computing Applications Center in Rio Rancho.

India gained its first entry to the top 10 with an HP Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c system, in fourth place. The supercomputer is owned by the Tata business group and installed at the Computational Research Laboratories in Pune.

HP’s Cluster Platform also took fifth place and the fourth highest new entry, thanks to strong performance at a government agency in Sweden.

The highest UK entry in the Top 500 was Cray’s HECToR at 17, based at the University of Edinburgh.

Sony has underscored its environmental commitment with the launch of a Graphic Splash Eco Edition range of notebooks.

The notebooks are part of Sony’s Vaio FZ line and are available in four designs: Caribbean Water, Clay Earth, Spotted Life and Bloom.

Sony has promised to donate one per cent of the price of each notebook to non-profit organisations working to preserve the environment via an alliance of businesses committed to creating a healthier environment.

The electronics giant is also offering rebates to consumers who trade in used PCs. Customers can bring their old PCs to a Sony Style store to be recycled and will be issued with a credit toward a new Vaio notebook.

The Vaio portfolio uses packaging comprised primarily of recyclable materials, and components that comply with the Restriction of Hazardous Substances directive which are free of materials such as lead. Sony also offers a battery recycling programme.

The Vaio Graphic Splash Eco Edition notebooks are available in limited quantities and start at about $1,400.

A green addition to the ever fabulous sony laptop brand is the eco edition vaio. The brand has gained even more customer attention than seen for any other laptop brand. Before the over whelming success of the said brand, toshiba laptop had held the biggest consumer equity in the market.

Intel will officially launch its 45nm Penryn processors on 12 November with a heavy focus on the enterprise.

The chipmaker will release 12 quad-core and three dual-core Xeon processors for servers, as well as a Core 2 Extreme chip for high-end PCs.

Additional models for desktop and notebook PCs are scheduled to follow by the first quarter of 2008.

Penryn chips will run 15 to 20 per cent faster on average than their predecessors, according to Boyd Davies, general manager for Intel’s server platform.

Intel is focusing on the server market because business users have the highest performance demands.

“A lot of the advanced chips that we deliver appeal to the sever market,” Davies told vnunet.com.

“It makes a lot of sense for our most advanced product to show up in the enterprise and enthusiast segments first.”

Intel also plans to introduce three new server chipsets. The firm currently offers chipsets for regular servers and blade servers.

The new line-up has two chipsets for rack-mountable and blade servers for enterprises, a single-socket chipset for small businesses, and a dual-socket chipset for medium businesses.

The biggest change is found in the 5400 chipset that targets the high-performance computing space. Intel has increased the clock speed for the Front Side Bus, allowing faster data transfer between memory and processor.

The chipset also offers a ’snoop filter’ that reduces bus traffic by monitoring data coherency. The chipset will offer a 50 to 60 per cent performance boost for high-performance computing applications, said Davies.

Intel had to overcome a significant design hurdle with its 45nm chips. As transistor sizes continue to shrink, chip components become so small that energy starts leaking through them, leading to a dramatic increase in overall energy consumption.

Intel revealed in January that it would start using Hafnium and other so-called High-K materials to achieve a reduction in power leakage. The technique allows Intel to keep using current-generation production techniques.

A consortium that includes IBM, AMD and other chip makers also claims to have succeeded at producing energy-efficient 45nm processors, but will not start shipping products until next year.

Intel’s Penryn launch allows the chipmaker to reclaim the x86 performance crown from AMD.

Launched in September, AMD’s quad-core Barcelona processor out-performed Intel’s quad-core Xeon on several benchmarks. The largest gap showed on a benchmark for floating point calculations which are often used in scientific applications.

Floating point has traditionally been one of AMD’s strong points. Intel revealed at its Developer Forum in September that Penryn would achieve a floating point score of 89.8, up four per cent on AMD’s 86.3.

The latest versions of 45nm Penryn chips have already been adopted by acer laptops after the market leader of innovative ideas apple laptops. The new technology offers the speed which is 20 to 25 percent faster than the offered by the predecessor dell laptops and is compatible with all the makes of the desktop PCS as well as with any notebook computer.