Get over to the other side and get updated in the mean time.

Nokia X6 To Land In The UK This Friday

If you have been eyeing Nokia’s latest touchscreen music phone – the X6, it is coming to the UK Friday. As is usual with many phones there, it has found a carrier who will be offering it for free against a long-time contract. This time it is Orange for £35/month.

For the SIM-free version you will have to pony up £449, which is roughly around $670 at today’s exchange rate. You can pre-order it from shop.nokia.co.uk from today. [read]

Skype Nokia N900 Demo Video

Nokia N900 comes with Skype built-in. So now you have more reason to buy the N900 for $649, that is if you can wait for the next shipments to arrive. The last I heard of it was that it was pre-ordered to capacity and new orders were behind huge queues. At least now you can get one for $480 on Amazon ($530-$50 mail in rebate). [read]

Skype has demoed Skype for Maemo on an official video. Since Skype is already available on Linux, this port could not have been all that hard to execute. [read]

UK Retailers Pull Satio, Big Bugs Need Squashing

Bad news folks, Sony Ericsson’s Satio is now as good as off the shelves right now. This decision had to be taken after numerous customers came in with complaints about freezes, mysterious powering down of the phone and other problems. The two major retailers of the Phone in the UK – Carphone Warehouse and Phones 4U – have decided to offer replacements to customers who are returning the Satio.

Official word from Sony Ericsson is that the issues will be fixed before Christmas. The bugs are apparently to deep for normal updates to tackle. Well, I guess that’s what we get for lusting after a too-good-to-be-true 12MP camera phone.

Kurara Reviewed, Is OKAY

Like he promised, the man behind mobile review has posted a more detailed look at the Kurara. From Murtazin’s post, it is clear that the phone sounds good on paper but it is pretty ordinary in person. It definitely fits the bill for an understudy of the Idou and should be priced somewhere around half of the high-end offerings. That said, if this phone is priced right, it could become a hot-selling phone for those who are looking for an entry-level touchscreen experience that is slightly better than the Samsung options.

The ARM Cortex Ab with 256MB RAM still is powerful enough to breeze through the Symbian UI. So that part is covered I suppose. Read the extensive review of it right here.

O2’s ‘Free’ HTC HD2

The Brits are at it again. They are really good at giving away phones for free as long as you promise to pay them a hefty sum. If you are in the market for the HTC HD2 and if you are in the UK, you can get it for free from O2 against a long-term contract. You will have to pay a nice £45 per month on it though. So far, I do not think the HD2 retailing SIM-free there. So O2 looks like the only option right now. [read]

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Ding! First Round Of UK iPhone Battle

As you might know, Orange UK has recently started selling the iPhone and in response to this new competition Vodafone and O2 have gone in to defense mode. To keep more customers on its side, Vodafone sent out an email to all those who had registered with the carrier prior to the iPhone release, in which they claim that their’s is the network that is the fastest for the iPhone.

In a slightly surprising move, O2 has begun offering an unlocking service for the iPhones. No, they are not going to hack any iPhone you bring in but they will unlock their own iPhones at the end of a contract. They are going to charge a £15 fee for it and they are also warning that the process might take some time, as long as up to 14 days. Even though they are charging for it, it would seem like they are trying to ring up some customer good will by doing this. Once they have unlocked the iPhones, the customer can insert any SIM card in to their iPhone and start using it legitimately.

O2 has also asserted that they have seen tremendous growth in their data network. According to the company — data usage on their network has grown 20 times in the last 12 months, doubling every 4 months. They are also offering free home broadband to people who buy into the tethering option to use their iPhone as a wireless modem.

Analysts have also been quoted saying that the iPhone is the best way to make customers pay more, even in this recessive market. But Vodafone is surely on the right track because what iPhone users mainly want is network strength. They are paying an awful lot to get the connectivity and hence they expect a lot in return. [read]

Orange has only just started selling the phone, so it is too early to say anything about them. But as far as the response goes, it has been extremely positive. The company has tweeted saying that they have recorded more than 30,000 iPhones on the very first day. For a phone that has been launched months back, this is really good indeed. The Droid has sold 100,000 units through the first week and it is a newly launched phone that has gotten positive reviews. Orange’s free film-themed app has also received a lot of success, hitting the number on spot in the entertainment category and the number two spot on the free apps category.

Hilton iPhone Apps To Give You More Choices

Guests of the Hilton hotel might soon be able to check in remotely and have food waiting for them when they arrive through multiple apps being launched by Hilton. I say might because once they reveal the app, it will still have to go through the App Store’s approval process. These apps are going to give you many more options and will “help you manage your stay.” [read]

Taptu Goes Real Time

Taptu is already well loved for their friendly mobile-searching app and now they are about to kick things up a notch. They have partnered with the real time search engine OneRiot to bring you search results as they are unfolding across the web. [read]

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ITV Player uses Microsoft’s Silverlight format to stream its media, which allows it to be played on Windows and Macs. Users report problems with it working under the Linux build of Silverlight. The website itself looks quite slick but is nowhere as near as nice to use as BBC’s iPlayer.

The service allows users to watch shows like Coronation Street but I cannot see any way to download these episodes to watch portably as you can with iPlayer.

Whilst it’s nice to see ITV using a non-Windows only brand (unlike Channel 4), it would have been good had they used a more universal format like Flash or OGG.

There are a few other issues with it. Many shows can’t be watch live due to licensing issues, the video is too small and the only options are small or fullscreen – unlike iPlayer. ITV Player also fails to offer HD shows.

I think ITV Player will either be drastically improved or scrapped! I’m surprised ITV are in-touch enough with the public to stay clear of DRM but I’m disappointed they used Silverlight and made it incompatible with Linux. The interface needs work too.

I expect the site won’t work outside the UK but it’s still a convenient service British readers may have overlooked. If it does work outside, please comment and let us know!

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A side-effect was that users of those Internet Service Providers in the United Kingdom were not able to modify other Wikipedia articles anonymously anymore.

It did not take long however before some users created a Greasemonkey script Antiproxy 4 Wikipedia so that users from the United Kingdom who cannot edit Wikipedia entries anonymously anymore have the opportunity to do so. A Firefox extension based on that Greasemonkey script has been designed in the meanwhile which can also be used to edit articles anonymously.

A more technical explanation can be found at Computerworld:

The measures applied caused the ISPs to redirect traffic for a significant portion of the UK’s Internet population through six proxy servers, which can log and filter the content that is available to the end user, Wikinews say. But the knock on effect resulted in Wikipedia being unable to distinguish UK users from one another by their IP address. That triggered Wikipedia’s anti-abuse mechanism, blocking all non-registered UK users from editing articles, according to the foundation.

A search for Virgin Killer will reveal the album cover on many websites who are still available for UK users.

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• Another USB Stick With Important Data Lost In The UK (3)

The last incident came to light this Sunday. The Times Online is reporting that an USB Stick was found outside a Brewers Fayre chain pub in Cannock, Staffordshire which contained confidential passwords, security software and the source code of the Government Gateway. The data on the stick could be used to access the personal details of more than 12 million individuals who registered on the system including names, addresses, national insurance numbers, credit card information or passwords.

The system had been shut down shortly after the USB stick was found (again) to protect the data of the citizens. According to government officials the system has not been breached by then. Even more pressing than the discovery of the data on the stick is the source code which could be used to exploit the system to a much larger extent.

Investigations are in full swing and should reveal additional information soon. Gordon Brown commented on the incident with the words: “It is important to recognize we cannot promise that every single item of information will always be safe because mistakes are made by human beings.”

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The ISPs in question, those that are better avoided like the plague from now on are: BT, Virgin Media, Orange, Tiscali, Sky and Carphone Warehouse. I really do not care as much for the reason why they signed the agreement as to that they did sign it at all. The Register thinks that they agreed to the “voluntary” code to avoid or even mute further legislation of the matter which might have forced them to invest in monitoring and storage equipment.

There is no word on punishment yet but it is interesting that the ISPs, Ofcom and the music industry have a few month to agree on a punishment. And I thought it would be the law that would determine the punishment, boy was I wrong.

The Music Industry is favoring the three strikes and you are out punishment which means that if your name, sorry IP, turns up three times you will be kicked out of your contract with the broadband company. No word yet on how they are going to manage false positives and identify offenders in first place and if the user has the right to appeal against the offending letter.

One of the Internet Service Providers (TalkTalk) published a FAQ already on their website that is answering some of the most pressing questions that their customers might have.

It will be interesting to watch how this unfolds.

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Now the interesting question that arises is why they would want to educate their customers. My first assumption would be that they, as a cable provider, want to reduce the average bandwidth usage of their customers in an effort to maximize the profits from their infrastructure. Usually filesharers have a much higher bandwidth demand than the usual Internet user with the exception of video portal junkies maybe.

Reducing the amount of filesharers that are their customers would definitely reduce the bandwidth bill of the ISP. Cable is a shared connection as well which could increase the speed of all customers as well.

The interesting question will be how they will pick the customers that will receive the warnings. Will they actively monitor P2P networks, will they only react when the BPI sends them a list, will they verify those lists ? What about false positives ? Someone who is download music from Jamendo using the Bittorrent protocol. Will he receive a warning as well ? What about secure Usenet connections ? IRC, FTP, file hosts. How the hell will they be able to determine that a file that is being transferred is indeed a copyright violation ? Filenames alone are without doubt not the safest way of determining that. So, how will they do that ?

My second assumption would be that Virgin Media could have some ties with the BPI or a company that is a member of the BPI. I really do not have enough time to research this so if anyone could help me out it would be appreciated.

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