Another chance to see our reviews from the last week

In the past seven days, Reg Hardware reviewed many products from the worlds of consumer electronics, photography, gaming, mobile communications and information technology.…

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Cheap deals for all

3 Mobile is shipping iPhone 4 today - along with T-Mobile UK, it was the last UK network to announce availability.…

Getting animated about Facebook

Disney has thrown over three quarters of a billion dollars to bring it up to Goliath status in the online gaming world, acquiring two and a half year old Playdom, which offers games for social networks – the new buzzword in gaming that has all the VCs on the planet hopping onto investments.…

Smaller sized set with big screen extras

Review  Monolithic is a desirable word, unless it’s applied to small things like a mobile phone, a peanut, a shrew. So does it fit a flatscreen TV, especially one at the lower end of screen sizes deemed suitable for a living room?…

Hacking human gullibility at Defcon

Defcon  A hacker competition that challenges contestants to trick employees of large companies into divulging potentially sensitive information aims to show how human gullibility is the biggest security vulnerability of all. During its first day at the Defcon hacker contest in Las Vegas, it had clearly achieved its goal.…

The camel's nose under Google's tent

A trio of Apple filings seek to patent mobile-application "systems and methods" for travel and online shopping — and to move us three steps closer to a Google-free world.…

Dressing up what you kill

Microsoft is so committed to the cloud that it's throwing everything at rivals like Google to crack open the door on sales and gain momentum online.…

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* - offensive humor may vary

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion is preparing to launch an iPad competitor in November, and it will be called the BlackPad, according to a report citing two people familiar with the company's plans.…

Gate not closing

When AMD spin-off GlobalFoundries broke ground on its fab in upstate New York last year, the chip manufacturer boasted it was "closing the gap" on Intel. "We were a year behind Intel at the 45nm node, and that difference will be cut significantly at the 32nm generation," said vice president of manufacturing systems technology Tom Sonderman. "By 22nm, there will be no difference. It will be in the noise level."…

Judas Phone 'death grip' proven fatal

More evidence has surfaced that Apple's beleaguered Judas Phone does, indeed, have serious reception challenges — and today's facts and figures come from a sophisticated source.…

Attacks on rise

Warning of an uptick in attacks, Microsoft plans to issue an emergency update to patch a critical Windows vulnerability that hackers are exploiting to seize control of PCs.…

Hunts down Japanese FTC

Microsoft will try to stop Yahoo! from hooking up with Google in Japan.…

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Take a peep

Leaving aside the creepy privacy aspects, Street View is one of Google's most valuable services. The ability to familiarise yourself with somewhere strange, before you arrive, is genuinely useful.…

Dust up over supposed evil particles

A futurologist has defended his controversial warning that "smart dust" is liable to become a future information stealing threat.…

A ClearPath to the development skies

A mainframe cloud may seem oxymoronic like a lead Zeppelin ("a" included on purpose), or intuitively obvious (given the virtualization and metering capabilities that have been in mainframes for decades). But Unisys has nonetheless fluffed up a mainframe cloud for its ClearPath mainframe customers.…

$20 million

BlueArc, the hardware-accelerated NAS array supplier startup, has pocketed another $20m in a seventh funding round, taking total funding to around $225m.…

Render foreign beatdowns unenforceable

The US House of Representatives has passed a law which will render libel rulings from the English courts unenforceable there. The bill has already been passed by the Senate and will go to US President Barack Obama to be signed into law.…

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No touching

Spar is going contactless, attracted by the four pence per transaction the company could save by not asking shoppers for their PINs.…

Capitalism and open source

Open...and Shut  When the mouthpiece of American capitalism calls a company a dog, it's time to re-evaluate that company's chances.…

...it's a... yes, one of those!

Mozy says that the bugs reported by users concerning repeated full backups were not bugs at all, instead reflecting a feature of the product.…

What happens in Vegas...

Security shortcomings in Black Hat's newly established streaming media service allowed a security consultant to hack into the system and see presentations for free.…

Na zdraví!

Beer drinkers in the Czech Republic, and that's most of country, will be raising a glass today to celebrate a local victory against Anheuser-Busch, the maker of US "beer" Budweiser.…

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HDD & SSD hybrid craftsmanship?

Word has reached us of a development project codenamed Katana inside Xiotech, with hints that the project involves HDD and SSD hybrid craftsmanship.…

Quickest crypto off the mark

The UK's Cyber Security Challenge has announced the winner of its prologue crypto puzzle, as well as the solution - for anyone still struggling to find an answer.…

Signs Voda UK for heavy lifting

TalkTalk is to launch its own mobile phone service, thanks to a deal with Vodafone UK.…

Stunned web developers die a little inside

Computers in Whitehall will largely continue to run Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6, which will make web coders spit out their cheese‘n’pickle sarnies this lunchtime.…

Shaves tariffs

Last month, we reported T-Mobile UK's price-plans for the iPhone 4. Today the telco start shipping the iphone, and has come in with lower tariffs .…

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Fun retro-snapper revived

Review  The news that Polaroid has a new instant camera, after we thought it was done with all that frivolity, is likely to be greeted with squeals of nostalgic joy. While digital is superior in almost every sense there's a real warmth about those 80s prints that we remember adorning fridges and noticeboards. The Polaroid 300 (tsk, these unwieldy techie names) takes you straight back to your childhood, making a spontaneity-encouraging break from all that DSLR refinement.…

So who gets the DVD collection?

A year after leaping into bed with O2, NatWest is no longer backing the operator's pre-paid credit card offering, citing differences in strategic goals as the cause of the breakup.…

Generosity knows no bounds

YouTube has bumped its upload limit to 15 minutes for users of the Google-owned video sharing website.…

Parliamentary privilege claim kicked out

The four politicians facing fraud charges over their expenses today failed in their bid to avoid prosecution by using ancient Parliamentary privilege laws.…

Hey, Mr Trampoline Man... what's that in your hand?

A 55-year-old described by the BBC as a 'man' and by Scotland's Daily Record as a 'pervert' has avoided jail after being spotted by neighbours having too much fun with too few clothes on a trampoline.…

Android in spaaace

If you've ever wondered what happens when you stick a Google Nexus One phone in a rocket and blast it to 28,000ft from the Nevada desert, then here's your answer:…

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Fat dollar spent on health advice sites

Four Whitehall departments gave Google and similar search engines more than £6m in two years to encourage web users to do more exercise, emit less CO₂ and stop smoking, among other initiatives.…

Watch where you click

Online con artists have developed a strain of scareware that poses as a Firefox update.…

Today's the day to pat yourselves on the back

It’s the last Friday in July, so that can mean only one thing - happy SysAdmin Day!…

Launch? What launch!

Apple's iPhone 4 went on sale today in New Zealand. But Vodafone NZ's handling of the launch left much to be desired, with hundreds of customers left in the lurch.…

Sitting pretty - but for how long?

In a lot of ways, Nvidia is the belle of the GPU/accelerator ball these days. (Make your reservations early for the upcoming "GPU Fancy Dress Cotillion" later on this year; tuxedo t-shirts encouraged.) Intel withdrew Larrabee, IBM isn't pushing Cell, FPGAs aren't gaining a lot of traction yet, and AMD is late to the party with Fusion.…

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Dismissed with a 'non' and a Gallic shrug

Updated  French network operator SFR is thumbing its nose at Apple by telling customers to think carefully before upgrading to iOS 4.…

Expense accounts

Starcraft 2 was released this week and at the hefty RRP of £45. Many games sites are hopping mad at this, although typically retailers are selling Blizzard's strategy game at £10 less than RRP.…

Orwellian black Opel scoots past infamous murder site

Until now, we at El Reg have assumed that Google's Street View spymobiles are as fearless as they are all-seeing, but it appears this may not be entirely true.…

In time for US welcome?

PartyGaming and Bwin have agreed to merge, just as moves to make online gambling legal in the US get a little closer.…

Running the stack from one screen

Hitachi's Unified Compute Platform (UCP) integrated IT stack idea is gathering momentum.…

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Raw info may be too confusing

The head of the government's website for the release of public sector data has said it is a challenge to ensure that users can understand the statistics.…

Pure and simple

Review  If a recent survey for HP is to be believed, Britons remain committed to packaged media, with 75 percent wanting hard copies of films in a box. So despite the advance of video streaming and downloading, perhaps it’s not yet time to write off conventional disc players, like Pioneer’s latest Blu-ray offering, the BDP-330.…

It's fully blocked!

Google's China search is working just fine, despite breathless claims from countless news organizations that it's "fully blocked."…

Up to 4 million downloads

An Android wallpaper application that collected data from users' phones and uploaded it to a site in China was downloaded "millions of times", according to mobile security firm Lookout.…

Forever is a mighty long time

Underscoring the permanence of data published on the internet, a security researcher has compiled the names and URLs of more than 100 million Facebook users and made them available as a BitTorrent download.…

DoJ doubles down on whistleblower suit

The US Department of Justice has filed a fresh lawsuit against Oracle, three months after intervening in a whistleblower suit that accuses the software giant of overcharging the government by "tens of millions of dollars."…

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'Job-one urgency'

FAM  Microsoft's chief executive has come very close to telling investors he screwed up after years of writing off, belittling and underestimated Apple's potential success in touch-based computing.…