It’s been on the cards for a while, but now the figures are starting to stack up for those who argue that the smartphone will kill off satnavs sooner rather than later.

GPS market leader, Garmin has seen it’s stock price fall by nearly 50% over the past two years, going from $51 to $29, with the that figure expected to drop once more –towards $26 – in the next few weeks. Meanwhile the company’s first foray into smartphones (the Garminfone) is also floundering. Continue Reading

Targeted squarely at business users, Cisco is set to launch its own tablet PC, coming complete with Google Android, a seven-inch high resolution screen and a promise that it will include Cisco’s collaboration software that integrates virtual desktop applications with high-definition video.

Is Cisco trying to create the BlackBerry of the tablet PC market?

Plans for the Cisco Cius, as it will be called, were announced during the company’s annual customer conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday. “We haven’t thought about a big consumer play at all here,” said Barry O’Sullivan, the senior vice president in Cisco’s voice technology group. “This is a mobile video device for corporate users.” Continue Reading

Jobs news aplenty this morning, first up there’s the statement from the IDA announcing that LinkedIn is to recruit 35 finance professionals at its international headquarters in Dublin. While elsewhere, and on a far larger scale, The Irish Times is reporting that Stream Global Services, a US firm that operates call centres around the world, is to create up to 400 jobs in Dublin, having won a contract with “a leading manufacturer of video game consoles”.

In March this year LinkedIn announced the establishment of its international HQ in Ireland and it now plans to commence recruitment immediately, with Sharon McCooey, newly appointed international finance director, will head up the operation. Continue Reading

What with the iPhone 4 pretty much taking over the world this week – queues outside the flagship store in London, units flying off the shelves in the US – it’s been a pretty good news week for Steve Jobs and co. However, one minor bug has been found with the new smartphone and as many left-handed people have suspected for a long time, this bug is more evidence that the world is against them.

‘Connectivity bars start melting away one by one after the skin of the palm came in contact with the lower left-hand corner of the unit’

According to a report in Dvice, “This could be the weirdest bug to hamstring a phone in a while. Left-handed callers are finding a serious drop in signal strength when using the iPhone 4. It’s thought that when one’s palm covers the bottom left corner of the phone it hampers the iPhone’s ability to make calls.” Continue Reading

It’s been claimed that Google will roll out a music download service tied to its search engine later this year, followed by an online cloud-based subscription service in 2011.

People using Google.com to look for a particular group or song will be served a link to the company's music store.

Un-named Google sources were pinned down for comment by the Wall Street Journal, though despite being guaranteed anonymity, they weren’t exactly forthcoming with that many juicy details. As the report on the matter says: Continue Reading

Last week’s number one free app in the App Store perhaps indicates that iPhone users may have a somewhat less than sophisticated sense of humour. ‘Ow My Balls’, which became listed as a free app just over a week ago (though it now costs 79 cent for the pleasure) was downloaded over half a million times in four days.

Does exactly what it says on the tin.

The app features a normal looking bloke in jeans and a jumper, who the player guides toward, yep you guessed it, repeatedly getting hit in the nads in as many different ways as possible. Sounds like fun to us. Continue Reading

The rather wonderfully named Barnaby Jack is set to deliver a rather interesting speech at this July’s Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. The security researcher says he plans to reveal security vulnerabilities of two types of ATM along with a new ATM rootkit.

Jack was originally due to give the talk, called Jackpotting Automated Teller Machines, at Black Hat USA 2009. TG Daily reports that that original speech was pulled due to concerns from one of his employers though, according to TG, “he’s now got a new employer who’s a little less uptight about its contents”.

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Microsoft is building a tool to aggregate all of a user’s social media activity into a single place. The project – which goes under the frankly woeful title of Spindex – will work in a similar way to products such as Friendfeed, and aims to show users all their social network activity without having to log in to the various sites.

Lili Cheng, general manager of Microsoft’s FUSE labs, unveiled the tool onstage at the Web 2.0 Expo yesterday afternoon in San Francisco, saying, “we kind of call it the impossible project”.

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Sony has begun using a new revision of the PlayStation 3 hardware in the latest consoles, one which is cheaper to produce and may even mean that individual PlayStation 3s can be sold at a profit.

Bit-Tech reports that the new hardware includes changes to the RSX graphics chip and tweaks to the RAM setup, adding that the new chip has changed to a 45nm version which uses 15% less power and is less prone to overheating, hopefully minimising on cases of the ‘yellow light of death’. “The Cell chip however remains unchanged,” adds the report.

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Good afternoon folks, hopefully the atrocious weather out there hasn’t been keeping anyone from having a good day so far. We’re in high spirits today after the success of our first Build Your Own PC Classes on Saturday just gone. While we’d done some classes before, we hadn’t tried anything on the same scale as Saturday’s class, but we’re happy to say that it was a success.

We can't pretend we're as cool, but we do know our stuff...

Until now, the classes had been a far smaller affair, run by Shelton from our RMA department on his own, but on Saturday we tried with a few more teachers and found that it worked out really well.

There were some teething difficulties (not least of which one of layout that ended up delaying our first class by about half an hour) but in the end we were able to add that time to the end of the class without too much bother, which worked out well.

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“hiya Chelsea its Elaine from work. Sorry to send u a message like this but bin tryin to ring u but gettin no joy. I had to tell the owner bout  u losin that tenner coz obviously the till was down at the end of day. she wasn’t very pleased at all and despite me trying to persuade her otherwise she said I have to let u go. I’m really sorry.”

The Facebook conversation between fired employee Chelsea Taylor and her former boss. Note the 'xx' at the end of the first message. Lovely.

Apologies for starting this news story with such bad diction but considering the above message is believed to be to be the first time in Britain a worker has been sacked via Facebook, we thought it was worth reading. For those who haven’t seen the full story behind this yet, this concerns 16 year-old Manchester schoolgirl Chelsea Taylor who got her dismissal letter from Elaine Sutton, the manageress of her former employers, Cookies Café in Leigh, Greater Manchester via a private Facebook message.

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Good afternoon all, hopefully we’re all suitably recovered from the madness of Paddy’s day yesterday to be back in work and not too woozy. Anyway, we generally post out Special Offers on a Monday afternoon, but things have been a bit hectic, given the week that’s in it perhaps not too surprisingly.

Anyway, better late than never, so for anyone with a little life left over from yesterday’s festivities, here are some of the items we’ve got on special offer this week.

Freecom 160GB External HDD:

When it comes to external storage, there are really two ways to go. The first is for massive storage, huge, mains powered affairs that are all about getting as much storage on one disc as the laws of physics will allow… which is nice, but doesn’t really allow for very much in the way of portability.

Click through to see our page for the Freecom 160GB External

By contrast, devices like Freecom’s USB storage XXS (creatively named as it is) are geared entirely towards offering a reasonable amount of storage and as much portability as possible. While it’s only 160GB, that should be more than enough to carry most people’s music collection or a few movies, meaning it’s the perfect go-between for carrying data from one machine to another or passing on your various works to a friend.

It’s all relatively small and simple, but this week Freecom’s 160GB external HDD is marked down to €47.81, which is hard to argue with. Because it’s so thin, it’s a solid compliment to a notebook, especially if you’re used to carrying the laptop in a case or if you’re the kind to run out of space and need to juggle things on and off a notebook or netbook often… let’s face it, we’ve all been there.

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