According to Nokia’s Finnish Web site the price of the new Nokia 7650 phone has been set at �795.00. Seems a bit steep to me, but I suppose we’ll have to wait and see when it finally arrives here in the UK. [Via Infosync]

According to this story France Telecom (who dey?) has come up with a flexible fibre optic screen which can be embedded in fabric and clothes. The photos accompanying the piece show a section of the screen displaying very crude pac-man type graphics, and if this is the state of the art one has to ask – why? The only thing that I can see coming out of this is a marketing man’s hot dream, people carrying around flashing product logos…

The Google Search Tool is a small utility designed to make it easy to use the Google search engine without having to navigate to the site itself. It looks to be well designed and flexible, but I can’t help thinking that it’s probably overkill for those of us who simply want to do fast look ups. My absolutely essential search tool is QuickSearch, which is a free component of the Microsoft Web Accessories pack. Once installed and configured, it allows…

It seems as though more companies are giving serious consideration to moving from Windows to Linux. I’m not sure how much of it can, or will, pan out once the real costs of re-training and disruption are taken into account, but this kind of competitive pressure can only be good for the computer industry as a whole. For those who may be interested here is a site containing Windows to Linux Migration Case Histories. Note that by definition this is…

Easy Message is yet another multi-client instant messaging program, which will cope with MSN, AOL, Yahoo! and ICQ. Claims to be simple and uncluttered, in contrast with its competitors. It certainly does look clean, although I couldn’t get it to log on to my ICQ account. Anyway take a look if you’re getting fed up with Trillian, Vista, IM Anywhere et al.

I stumbled across a couple of useful sites the other day which provide details on cyber cafes around the world. The Cybercafe Search Engine lists information on over 6000 cafes in 167 countries, which makes it a pretty awesome resource. The Cybercafes.com site is not as big (4000 locations in 149 countries) but it does give more detailed information, such as opening times and pricing. For the sake of completeness let me add in The List, a vast list of…

The story of the felt tip pen hack to break the copy protection on those annoying protected audio CDs has been going the rounds for a while now, but what I find hilarious are the reports that technically felt tip pens should now be made illegal in the US under the terms of their Digital Millennium Copyright Act, since they can obviously contribute to the breaking of a copy protection scheme. Arf arf!

I’m not generally a great fan of most of these Internet Explorer browser replacement shells, but this one was recommended to me by my good fwiend Bob and it looks quite useful. My IE Web Browser is a small browser based on the IE engine that adds in things like a pop up ad remover, Web page tabs and grouping, and a fairly comprehensive privacy cleanup of cookies, history and address bar URLs. Definitely worth a look.

Need to add your email address to your Web site? Want to keep it out of the hands of those nasty email harvester robots used by spammers to grab addresses from sites to use? Then download Mail Coder and enjoy! It converts standard email addresses into illegible code that the harvesters can’t recognise or use. It’s tiny, free, bogglingly simple to use and works perfectly. Created by Fahim Farook, developer of the awesome Blog software that powers The Ferret. A…

OK, so visual search engines are not really new, but Kartoo is definitely one of the most interesting, and graphically rich, that I’ve seen. I still can’t see any advantage of these services over the sheer power of Google, but I am prepared to eat my words some day if something extraordinary does pop up. Meanwhile have a play with this for fun if nothing else. [via Lockergnome]

OK, so visual search engines are not really new, but Kartoo is definitely one of the most interesting, and graphically rich, that I’ve seen. I still can’t see any advantage of these services over the sheer power of Google, but I am prepared to eat my words some day if something extraordinary does pop up. Meanwhile have a play with this for fun if nothing else. [via Lockergnome]

Here’s a neat SMS application for those who are still non-believers. The British Airports Authority, which runs the…er…airports in the UK, has set up a Flying Messenger service which lets you receive instant status on any arriving or departing flights via SMS messages to the mobile phone. It’s obviously early days yet, as the service is only available for Heathrow and Gatwick – two of the biggest in the UK – and it is only available to Vodafone and Celnet…

Don’t be surprised if you pop down to your local health club one day soon and find a room full of Jet-Li wannabes doing their stuff on some new exercise machines. Arcade games giant Konami is now intent on bringing the console game environment into the health market with a range of games oriented hardware. Kung Fu and adventure type exercise games appear to be on the cards, according to the company’s Japanese site. I don’t speak the language, but…

From the ‘how not to win friends’ department. Giant games publisher Electronic Arts has just announced that it will not be supporting Microsoft’s XBox Live online multiplayer service which is due to launch this year, and will instead only support Sony’s PS2 rival. Seems like EA doesn’t like the fact that Microsoft is forcing publishers to use their own fee based network instead of leaving the choice to the publishers, as Sony appears to be doing. Also the fact that…

BBC Online has posted a interesting report on the incredibly rapid acceptance of smartcard technology by the Japanese to pay for their train tickets. Apparently the system – which lets you pay for your journey by waving your card over the top of the reader as you pass the turnstile – have been adopted by 3.6 million out of the 4.5 million potential users of one particular train service in just six months. The cards can be topped up with…