Internet
Midband blues
BT has confirmed that its "midband" internet access service will cost £35 a month, making it more expensive than its ADSL broadband service. The telco had previously said that "£20 to £25 seems about right" for the service.
The Register, a tech news website, reported that the flat-rate service will be limited to 75 hours' usage per month, if used at its maximum speed of 128 kilobit per second (kbps), and 150 hours if used at 64 kbps. There will be a two-hour limit to each session, and a hoped-for always-on email service has been dropped for technical reasons.
Shaun Thomas, who is campaigning for broadband in the Colne Valley in Essex, says the result will be of no interest to him, even if his area does not get an ADSL-enabled exchange: "£35 a month, limited to five hours a day, is worse than broadband," he said. But the new service will be available to a much larger proportion of the country than ADSL and cable broadband.
Pay as you go
Metronet has become the first ISP to offer a form of pay as you go broadband net access in the UK. Whereas its rivals offer unlimited access with a fixed fee, Metronet's service bills users on the amount of data they download.
Its cheapest option, PayGo500, costs £10 per month and offers traditional broadband download speeds of 512kbps and uploads of 256kbps. Users can download up to 200MB per month free, thereafter they pay an additional 2.3p per megabyte. The service is capped so the maximum a user can pay on this tariff is £23.99 per month no matter how much they download.
Metronet is also offering one and two megabit services. The systems runs via BT's ADSL exchanges so won't be available to all users.
www.metronet.co.uk
Report that spam
Internet service provider AOL will release version 8.0 of its software, including a Report Spam button, within the next fortnight. The button simultaneously deletes junk email and reports it to AOL's abuse department.
Its introduction in the US led to sharp rise in reporting, with 5.5 million spam emails blocked in one day in March. The ISP is using this data to take legal action against a dozen spammers in the US: in December it won damages of $7 million against CN Productions, a US pornographic website firm, for breaking an injunction to stop spamming AOL members.
AOL's move comes as email management firm Brightmail says that pornographic spam makes up 19% of spam, up from 5% in November 2001. The firm says that 45% of all email is now spam.
Meanwhile, SecurityFocus.com reports that spammers are turning to virus-writers' techniques to keep the junk emails flowing.
Gadgets
Snapper updated
Canon has unveiled the latest incarnation of its popular Digital Ixus digital camera. The Digital Ixus II stainless steel-finished snapper is smaller and lighter than its predecessors, takes 3.2 megapixel images and features 2x optical and 3.2x digital zooms. It can shoot and store video clips of up to three minutes with audio. Most significant of all is that the Ixus II is Canon's first camera to use the Secure Digital (SD) card for storage. Previous Canon models have saved images on the much larger CompactFlash card. The Digital Ixus II is expected to go on sale in the UK in June priced at around £370. www.canon.co.uk
Smart call
Siemens' mission to reinvent the mobile phone continues with the June launch of the SL55. Following on from a pendant style mobile (Xelibri) and a smartphone with buttons flanking the screen rather than beneath it (the SX1), the SL55's design twist is a slide-down keypad. The tiny phone also boasts a colour screen, picture messaging (although to send images the £100 QuickPix snap on-camera is required), Wap via GPRS and the option of assigning different ringtones to different callers. Available in either chrome or red, the triband phone will be sold initially through Orange with a price tag of around £200
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Make some noise
Last year saw the release of innovative product called the Soundbug which could be used to turn any flat surface like a desk or a window into a speaker.
Now a British company, Omnivox, has used a similar technology to develop a far more powerful product aimed at the corporate market. Designed to be used in presentations the small circular Omnivox device connects to a laptop PC and then turns the desk into its speaker. It is accompanied by a neat carry case that includes leads and a universal power supply. The Omnivox is available now priced at around £300.
www.omnivox.biz
Zen-like
Days after Apple took the wraps of its new 30GB iPod MP3 player, Creative Labs played its trump card - the latest incarnation of its Nomad Jukebox Zen which sports a 60GB hard disk offering twice as many tunes as its rival player (16,000 as opposed to the I-Pod's 8000). The Nomad Jukebox Zen also claims a battery life of 14 hours, twice that of the iPod, and will retail in the US for $400, $100 less than the Apple product. There's no news yet of a UK launch or pricing.
The player is also not unlike the iPod in terms of styling, though it is larger and arguably less elegant than the Apple player.
http://uk.europe.creative.com
Music everywhere
Yamaha Audio is claiming to be the first company to offer a multi-room audio system that works wirelessly by using the 802.11b format. Due to launch in the UK in September, the MusicCast system has a large capacity music server that transmits the audio to a series of terminals that have to be connected to speakers. Owners can listen to up to eight different musical streams on eight different terminals/speakers. The server features 80GB of storage - enough for 100 CDs or 1,000 albums of MP3 compressed music - and has an integrated CD burner to enable users to create their own discs.
www.yamaha-audio.co.uk
Hardware
Faster eMacs
Apple has just unveiled an updated version of its eMac desktop computer for education. Two of the three new versions of the machine, which has a CRT rather than flat-panel display, now boast a 1GHz G4 processor, while the bottom-end model has a 800MHz processor. All the machines have improved graphics and the capability to be fitted up with 802.11g Airport Extreme wireless networking. Prices start at £699 including VAT, rising to £999 for the version with built-in DVD burner.
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