AT&T takes on Google fibre, fixin' to give Texans GIGABIT GUNS
America's dominant telco will take on Google in fitting 1Gb/sec broadband in Austin, Texas, engaging in a numbers battle which will delight a few while doing nothing for the majority.
The "GigaPower" service will only stretch to around one per cent of Austin homes, but enables AT&T to match Google's boast of 1Gb/sec broadband …
LIVE, my beauty, LIVE! Nokia revives dead phone with LIGHTNING powered Frankencharger
It sent a DeLorean back though time, brought Frankenstein's monster to life and nearly got Benjamin Franklin killed, but now the power of lightning has been harvested to charge a mobile phone.
White-coated boffins at the University of Southampton were co-opted by Nokia to catch a 200,000-volt spark and step it down before …
Wireless-charging power struggle latest: Qualcomm invades rival to kill upstart
Despite founding a wireless charging standards body - the Alliance for Wireless Power - chip-designer Qualcomm has joined the board of competing body the Wireless Power Consortium in the hope of trouncing a third rival, the Power Matters Alliance.
Qualcomm joined the board of the Wireless Power Consortium (WPC) last week, but …
ATOM SMASHER ON A CHIP technology demonstrated
Stanford uni scientists have created a particle accelerator on a chip smaller than a grain of rice (albeit one that won't actually accelerate particles).
The details are in heavyweight boffinry mag Nature, in a paper titled Demonstration of electron acceleration in a laser-driven dielectric microstructure.
Particle acceleration …
OUCH: Google preps ad goo injection for Android mobile Gmail app
The world's biggest advertising company is preparing to push adverts into its Android mobile Gmail client, no doubt to the surprise and alarm of fandroids who thought their private data was recompense enough.
The news comes from Android Police, which has been busily dismantling the latest version of the Gmail app for Android ( …
Fondling slabs during takeoff WON'T end in a fireball of death - report
The Federal Aviation Administration's advisory committee reckons it's safe for air passengers to read ebooks and use tablets during takeoff and landing – as long as the built-in radios remain switched off.
The US governmental body in charge of air transport isn't obliged to follow the recommendation of the 28-member committee, …
DEAD STEVE JOBS kills Apple bounce patent from BEYOND THE GRAVE
The late Apple baron Steve Jobs has critically wounded one of his company's key "bounce to update" related patents in Europe.
A German court has nixed a photo-gallery app design, filed by Apple in June 2007, after a video of Jobs demonstrating the software with the rubber-band bounce effect five months earlier was deemed prior …
Nokia demonstrates: White Space ploy can get more 4G handsets into same spectrum
Nokia has successfully demonstrated a 4G LTE network which can hop aside when someone else wants the frequency, opening up the possibilities for dynamically-shared radio spectrum.
Nokia's test network reached three Finnish cities and was able to switch radio frequencies based on availability by regularly checking back with a …
Reg readers! You've got 100 MILLION QUID - what would you BLOW it on?
Telecoms regulator Ofcom is drawing up its plans for 2014/15, and is looking for suggestions about how it might direct its considerable resources during the period.
Last year, those resources ran up a bill a shade over a hundred million pounds, some of which comes from radio spectrum licensing and fines but most of it came from …
Broadcom fries up '5G' Wi-Fi chips to chuck in your connected car
Broadcom's latest chippery supports 802.11ac and Bluetooth LE too – which the company reckons is good enough to warrant calling it "5G" and snatching a chunk of the automotive market.
The claim comes because of the Wi-Fi support, which has a theoretical top speed of 1Gb/sec, and despite the fact that this number was once the …
Ericsson adds Dot to the office mobe coverage map
Ericsson has launched a palm-sized mobile phone base station called Dot, which camps on the office LAN to provide cellular coverage throughout your building and is managed by a radio stack in the basement.
The Dot is styled to disappear into the office décor. Weighing only 300g, it's more than an antenna but less than a …
Samsung unveils Galaxy Note 3: HOT CURVES – the 'gold grill' of smartphone bling
Everything is better with a few curves. While the concavity of the Samsung-built Nexus phone failed to set the world alight, that's no reason to stop bending it like Beckham.
That's according to Samsung's "head of strategic marketing" who told reporters assembled for the Seoul launch of the Galaxy Note 3, including one from …
Amazon Kindle Fire HDX: Bezos dives into tech-support MONEY PIT
The latest Kindle Fire HDX tablets come with a free 24/7 support hotline via video chat. Putting a human face within easy reach may just push Amazon into the never-ending money-suck that is tech support.
Here's how the video-chat help desk is supposed to work; your mileage may vary:
Youtube Video
The HDX is an evolution of the …
Highways Agency tracks Brits' every move by their mobes: THE TRUTH
The Highways Agency, tasked with looking after England's motorways, buys data on Brits' whereabouts from mobile phone networks.
The information, harvested by tracking the location of everyone's handsets and anonymising it into blocks of statistics, is used to establish which roads are used the most and when - much to the …
Apple TV update available after weekend tellybox-wiping snafu
Friday's update to Apple TV, which was unceremoniously pulled over the weekend following stability issues, is back again – with iTunes radio and cloudy AirPlay support.
The update, version 6.0, disappeared some time on Sunday following reports of eager upgraders seeing their content disappear or their beloved TV boxes bricked. …
HTC staring down the barrel of a US sales ban after Nokia's patent coup
Electronic gadgets made by HTC infringed two of Nokia's patents, US officials have ruled - and it's a decision that could lead to a ban on sales in America, or at least convince HTC to cough up some royalties.
Shockwaves from the judgement by the Uncle Sam's International Trade Commission (ITC) in Washington [PDF, mind-numbing] …
Fandroids at pranksters' mercy: Android remote password reset now live
Android users can now lock their handsets from afar as Google enables what looks like the perfect feature for office pranksters.
Making a lost Android handset ring and wiping all the data on a stolen device have been standard features in the advertising giant's mobile operating system for a while. Now, however, a mislaid Android …
RADIATION SNATCHED from leaky microwave ovens to power gadgets
A collaboration between universities in Tokyo and Atlanta has spawned a device for harvesting power leaked from domestic microwave ovens – turning wasted waves into free energy.
Microwaves pump out energy in the 2.4GHz band: the industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) radio space popularised by Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The casing …
How I hacked SIM cards with a single text - and the networks DON'T CARE
Karsten Nohl, the security researcher who broke into SIM cards with a single text, has told The Register he is dismayed by the mobile industry's lukewarm response to his revelations - and has revealed, for the first time, exactly how he did it.
Nohl thought exposing the flaws in SIM security would force the telcos to fix them. …
EE still has fastest, fattest 4G pipe in London's M25 ring
RootMetrics has compiled a map of 4G deployments in London which includes a whopping 11,000 crowd-sourced data points and concludes that within the M25*, EE still has the fastest, and broadest, network in town.
That shouldn't be very surprising as EE started a year earlier than its competitors, utilising the excess of radio …
Douglas Adams was RIGHT! TINY ALIENS are invading Earth, say boffins
Aliens rained down on Earth from space, possibly sprinkling microbes on our once lifeless planet, according to boffins from the University of Sheffield.
And the scientists claim they managed to photograph one of the extraterrestrial blighters from a balloon.
The balloon was launched to a height of 27km, which the eggheads argue …
PEAK APP: After 2013, you'll NEVER again install as many – Gartner
It's peak app time, according to tech analyst Gartner, which claims the average user will never again download as many apps as they did in 2013.
The beancounters say that growth in the ecosystem is now reliant on new users joining the throng.
The peak is 4.9 downloads a month for iPhone owners, and 6.2 for those packing an …
Google tries putting an NFC ring on it: Bonking will keep you SAFE
Google has started testing NFC keyrings from one-time-pad makers Yubico, with a view to offering them to ordinary punters next summer as a secure way of accessing the Google cloud.
The keyrings feature a USB interface and an embedded NFC tag, either of which can supply a one-time password securing connection. The technique is …
Hiroshi Yamauchi, bizlord who gave the world Donkey Kong, dead at 85
The man who took Nintendo from a small family business into an international megacorp has copped it, aged 85. Hiroshi Yamauchi died of pneumonia in a Japanese hospital on Thursday morning.
Yamauchi stepped down as president of Nintendo in 2002, and left the board in 2005, but remained the largest individual shareholder and was …
South American with a dumb phone? Think Facebook can't get to you? THINK AGAIN
Digital security outfit Gemalto has extended its SIM-based Facebook client to include Facebook Messenger, so dumbphone users can chat directly to each other as well as update each other's walls.
Gemalto's LinqUp SIM app has already connected Facebook to basic handsets in Argentina, Colombia and Chile, enabling the cheapest of …
Apple named in criminal lawsuit over Premier League–streaming app
Apple has been summoned to court in Thailand for approving an app which streams UK Premier League football games to an iPhone, in breach of the exclusive contract signed by local telly firm Cable Thai Holding.
CTH paid $300m for the exclusive rights to show chaps kicking a ball around a pitch on a Saturday afternoon, according …
How to get a Raspberry Pi to take over your Robot House
Behold: The RaZberry is a daughter board which snaps onto a Raspberry Pi, turning it into a Z-Wave controller capable of integrating, and controlling, a home automation network though a web, or JSON, interface.
We all love the Raspberry Pi, don't we? It could have been built for home automation, offering low power consumption …
TWO can play this 64-bit mobile game, says Samsung, crossly
Samsung's next smartphone will feature a 64-bit processor, according to co-chief executive Shin Jong-kyun: he's keen to prove it's not only Apple who can stuff more register bits into a chip.
Apple's latest flagship iThing, the iPhone 5S, features a 64-bit ARMv8 processor labelled the A7. The performance boost may not be …
You thought NFC tags were Not For Consumers? Well, they're in Maplin's
High street retailer Maplin will be stocking NFC tags, surely demonstrating that the technology is mainstream even if no one is quite sure what it's for.
The tags, which come from RapidNFC, are supplied in packs of twelve which retail at £9.99. That's a £1.70 premium on the manufacturers price of £8.29 but the manufacturer …
Fancy a new iPhone 5C or 5S? READ THIS or you may not get 4G data
Apple might have launched two new iPhone models on Tuesday, but it launched 10 different variants as Cupertino struggles to cope with the hugely fragmented 4G market.
Where a GSM phone might be dual-band or the frequent flyer might shell out for a quad-band handset, Apple's latest phones each come in five variants: two hendeca- …
Ready to bin your USB cables yet? Wireless USB hops on WiGig bandwagon
Having failed to carve itself a niche with ultrawide band radio, the USB Implementers Forum has jumped aboard the WiGig bandwagon and will slide up the dial into 60GHz.
60GHz is where WiGig lives, an internationally unlicensed band where there's plenty of space but propagation is poor. WiGig is proposed as the next generation of …
NSA slides reveal: iPhone users are all ZOMBIES
Spooks at the US National Security Agency (NSA) can't believe we're all paying for the equipment it's using to spy on us, describing Steve Jobs as Big Brother and iPhone buyers as "zombies".
That assertion comes from NSA documents leaked to Germany's Spiegel Online.
The self-promoting presentation, purportedly an internal NSA …
Amazon DENIES launch of iPhone-killing freebie smartphone
Amazon won't be launching a freebie phone later this year, in fact it won't launch any phone this year and has no future plans to give hardware away, ever.
The story started on Friday as an exclusive from ex-WSJ journo Amir Efrati, and spread across the blogosphere like wildfire as it sounded feasible and came from "people …
Ofcom set to fatten up London's White Space TV spectrum
Next year Londoners will get access to 72MHz of unlicensed radio spectrum, all in the prime sub-1GHz band, as Ofcom prepares to open the TV airwaves to anyone with a database handy.
Ofcom's new consultation on opening up White Space frequencies shows London as the biggest winner thanks to the presence of the Crystal Palace …
UK investor throws £14.8m at firm that makes UNFORGEABLE 2-cent labels
UK investment house Invesco has acquired 13 per cent of Norway's ThinFilm, just as the company prepares to launch its first printed product, which it tells us will cost almost two cents.
The investment gives Invesco 56 million shares in ThinFilm, which amounts to 13.3 per cent of the company, but this should provide the …
Campus Party: Did it start Silicon Britain or let 5,000 geeks sleep together?
This year's Campus Party didn't hit the target of 10,000 geeks in a giant tent - but it did manage half that and showed them how to program a Raspberry Pi and overclock a PC, the nerd equivalent of ballroom dancing while on a cruise ship.
The Pi programming session was overcrowded, with peeps lining up to learn how the …
Ofcom launches idiot's guide to traffic-shaping
UK net regulator Ofcom has published an idiots' guide to traffic shaping to try to encourage people to see how wonderful it is ahead of the inevitable battle over net neutrality.
Starting with a history of the internet, the document (PDF, as silly as it sounds) explains that in the early days there wasn't any congestion – …
Three used cheap deal to lure me into buying expensive slab, chap tells ASA
UK mobile network Three has been rapped for touting a tablet computer that customers couldn't actually buy – and then, having got the interested punters on the phone, tried flogging them a more expensive slab instead.
One outraged man told the advertising watchdog that an ad on Three's website stated that the operator's online …
10,000 app devs SLEEP together in four-day code-chat-drink tech orgy camp
London's O2 is this week hosting Campus Party - a four-day tech-fest during which as many as 10,000 software developers from across Europe get together for coding, talking and drinking. The marketing people like to call it Glastonbury For Geeks.
Campus Party does have tents – three and a half thousand of them, two geeks to a …
Vodafone, can you get a signal at the top of your $130bn Verizon cash pile?
Verizon will buy out its UK partner Vodafone from their US joint-venture Verizon Wireless for $130bn, as expected.
But rather than pocketing or spending the cash after years of negotiations, Voda will hand most of it over to its shareholders and nothing at all to the UK taxman.
The deal - one of the biggest in corporate history …
Nokia drives cars into the clouds: Hear HERE, you're here, hear?
Nokia will assault car manufacturers next week, using the International Motor Show to launch HERE Auto, an updated platform intended to carve Nokia a home in the dashboard.
The Finnish phone-maker will be adding an improved platform for car manufacturers willing to embed its technology – one which comes with live traffic …
Vodafone and Verizon update relationship status: $130bn worth of complicated
Vodafone has confirmed it is in "advanced talks" with Verizon, which has agreed to pay $130bn to buy out its UK partner - and has apparently found a way to avoid paying tax on the windfall too.
Tax has been the stumbling block to previous deals. Vodafone has made good money on its Verizon investment – it currently owns 45 per …
Foursquare gets pushy with fandroids, touchy Windows 8 bods
Foursquare has started pushing itself into the Android notification bar and supporting Windows 8, as the company tries to turn its location-announcing app into a real business.
The latest version of Foursquare for Android doesn't wait for users to check in before telling them about local services in which they might be …
Fandroids blow $200,000 on secret PANIC BUTTON for their smartmobes
The cleverly-designed Pressy gadget drops into the headphone socket on any Android handset, adding a button that can be linked to any action.
While Apple might spend its time eradicating buttons, and touchscreens remain flavour of the decade, physical controls have advantages and there are rarely enough of them. Meanwhile the …
China stuffs rag in mouth of biz-rumour web ring
A Chinese clampdown on online rumour-mongers has netted 27 staff at Shui Jun Shi Wan, a firm which specialises in seeding stories across its microblogging network of 220 million followers.
Spreading false rumours is illegal in China, but has been big business for companies like Shui Jun Shi Wan, which hired out its Sina Weibo ( …
Punter strikes back at cold callers - by charging THEM to call HIM
Two years ago Lee Beaumont, fed up of receiving daily phonecalls from telemarketing agencies, connected his home landline to a premium rate phone number and started cashing in on cold callers - covering his costs in less than two months.
Beaumont splashed out £12 on an 0871 premium rate phone number, which he promptly gave to …
IP telly upstart stuffs Comedy Central, MTV in Freeview box
Another upstart is using Freeview's IP connectivity to launch premium channels, but this time there might even be something worth watching, or even paying for.
VuTV will launch in the autumn on Freeview HD channel 238, but it won't be "broadcast". The service takes advantage of the MHEG (digital text) Interactive Channel to …
Vodafone mulls $100bn Verizon stake sale - now about that $10bn tax bill...
Vodafone is back in talks with Verizon about selling its 45 per cent stake of Verizon Wireless, US's biggest mobile network operator.
Today Voda "confirmed press speculation" that negotiations on selling out are back on. But it won't comment on the Wall Street Journal's claim that Verizon has come up with a way for Voda to …
Keep on truckin'... Qualcomm sells OmniTRACS for $800m
Chip designer Qualcomm has sold off the product which made its name; the OmniTRACS vehicle-tracking platform which has been keeping truckers on the leash for 25 years.
The market-leading vehicle management platform – certainly in the United States – OmniTRACS uses satellite communications to track and connect fleet vehicles, …
Web showered in golden iPhone 5S vid glory - but is it all a DISTRACTION?
A video has emerged online demonstrating what may or may not be a gold champagne-hued iPhone 5S and blue plastic 5C, both the next models lined up for Apple's smartmobe family.
The launch of the iOS 7 handsets is scheduled for 10 September. Corroborating rumours suggest we'll see a flagship 5S - available in a champagne-coloured …
