Dell's PDA hits UK shelves

Dell has officially launched its Axim X5 handheld in the UK and across Europe. The Pocket PC-based handheld is available in two configurations and is aggressively priced. The minimum spec model, with colour screen and 32Mb SDRAM has an RRP of ?169, while more RAM and ROM will cost you ?229. ...more

Colour LCD shortage hits iPaq

It seems iPaqs have been losing their colour for our American cousins - a shortage of colour LCD screens has meant some drastic measures for Compaq. Drastic is probably too strong a word, but the company has been forced by shortages to launch a black-and-white version of the popular iPaq H3600 PocketPC. The black-and-white model has been available in Europe and most of the world, but this is the first time has been introduced to the US and Canadian markets. ...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

LaCie unveils first external Blu-ray drive for Macs and PCs

LaCie has announced that it will be the first company to ship an external Blu-ray drive for Macs and Windows PCs. The new drive is one of several new storage devices the company unveiled today. The BD drive has a dual USB/FireWire interface and is housed in an aluminium d2 casing. ...more

Wikipedia shuts out Qatar

Wikipedia's administrators took the unprecedented step of blocking an entire country's access to the collaborative encyclopaedia after a spate of acts of cyber vandalism. Wikipedia users from Qatar vandalised pages about the US, sex and Mohammed; normally these users are individually blocked using their IP address, but Qatar's lone ISP, QTel, operates a proxy server to handle all Internet traffic. As a result all of the country's Net users appear to have the same IP address. ...more