Communication Breakdown

Remember how we told you about two months ago that BT was moving into the smartphone market with the HTC S620? Well, it's finally been released.

The SIP-enabled (and QWERTY-keyboarded) handset should be perfect for VoIP - BT is certainly punting it as such, offering free calls from Openzone hotspots. The operator is also using the occasion to launch its new Office Anywhere service, bringing push email etc into the equation and letting users migrate their BT Business email accounts over to the smartphone. As an extra incentive, the S620 is being offered free on contract for a limited period.

Cheers to CoolSmartPhone for alerting us to a particularly funny bit of penwork...

Following on from EMI's recent decision to make the nasty DRM go away, The Good, The Bad and The Queen (a supergroup/project comprising Damon Albarn from Blur/Gorillaz, Paul Simonon from the Clash, Simon Tong from Verve and Afrobeat legend Tony Allen) have become the first band on that label to release an album sans restrictions.

There is a certain poignancy to this, given Albarn's recent assertion that he has converted to communism, apparently as a reaction to the Iraq war. I'm not entirely sure that selling songs - with or without DRM - is the best way to strike at the heart of capitalism, but there you go...

Viv Reding's proposed legislation to put a serious cap on roaming charges passed another stage today, as it was OK'd by the Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE) Committee of the European Parliament.

We're not doing a story proper on this one, as it all gets a bit repetitive what with all these Eurocratic hurdles. If you don't know what the heck I'm on about, click here for our most recent piece on the issue, but otherwise just keep your eyes peeled for the next stage, which will be the parliamentary plenary vote in a few weeks' time. Soon after that, hopefully, we should have some functioning legislation!

Viruses, eh? We hate 'em, yet frustratingly we just can't put a face to them.

Well, Sophos can. The security firm has helpfully issued a range of pictures illustrating various types of malware, from rootkits (man injecting something into the bottom of a tree) to the Love Bug worm (buxom woman with chainsaw) to zombie attacks (guess) to, er, Christmas-related spam (a rather demonic-looking Father Christmas wearing high-heeled boots for some obscure reason).

Well, I hope they had fun doing it. The illustrations can be found here.