BlackBerry Messenger unleashed: Look out Twitter and Facebook
Analysis Ignorant tech pundits just aren't down with the kids
BlackBerry announced this week that its flagship messenger service, BBM, will no longer be tied to its proprietary handsets, potentially opening up a lucrative licensing stream which could rescue the beleaguered mobe-maker.
Fan forums have been in meltdown after the announcement. From some, the pain appears to be personal. Odd …
Copyright minister: Google has better access to No. 10 than me
Downing Street overrun with whispering Oompa-Loompas
Google has greater access to No. 10 Downing Street than the government's own ministers, one such minister has admitted. Viscount Younger of Leckie, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Intellectual Property - the third copyright minister in a year - made the candid confession before the Media, Culture and Sport …
Currant Bun erects £2 paywall: Wraps digi-paper around free footie
We've heard worse ideas
British tabloid The Sun has revealed a subscription plan to access the digital version of the newspaper, Sun+.
The daily is essentially offering a football video package with The Sun's stories wrapped around it, for £2 a week.
Near-live TV clips of Premier League games will be bundled in the deal, as News International's parent …
New Lumia 925: This, loyalists, is the BIG ONE you've waited for
Hands-on Nokia veep drills high-end master plan for El Reg
Today, Nokia launched its best smartphone to date: the Lumia 925.
I got some hands-on time with the Windows Phone 8-powered device - and a tour of the gadget by shoegaze icon Nokia senior veep of product management Kevin Shields, who explained some of the key design decisions. It's a covetable bit of kit - but with iPhones and …
BlackBerry and Apple pie this summer. Or BBM-onna-Droid
Hey, rivals, have our loyal fans! No, wait
BlackBerry's hugely popular social-network-in-hardware BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) will be available on iPhone and Android for free from this summer.
BBM is one of the defining features of the BlackBerry, a brilliantly designed social network that has earned the firm a compulsive following. For BBM's "members", the messenger is …
BlackBerry's Q5 QWERTY gets flirty with buy-curious teens
We need to talk about Kevin
BlackBerry's new Q5 QWERTY smartphone was revealed today as "youthful and fun", rather distancing the device from its pinstripe pocket-dwelling siblings, the Q10 and Z10.
The Q5 a mid-range sibling to the first BlackBerry OS 10 QWERTY phone, the Q10, which we reviewed here last week. But somewhat surprisingly, the BB10-powered …
Full metal jacket: Nokia launches new Lumia 925
4G phone for grown-ups
Nokia tweaked the top of its range with a new 4G Windows 8 model today.
The aluminium 925 breaks with Nokia’s Stickle Brick garish-coloured plastic design philosophy and offers a more grown-up styling. The camera module is snaffled from the erstwhile flagship, the 920, with optical image stabilisation, spruced up with an extra …
Android is a mess and needs sprucing up, admits chief
Comment Can Google really fix it? It isn't in control any more
Android looks unstoppable, and it's a mess. The first fact tends to eclipse the second observation, but Android's new supremo diplomatically acknowledges as much in an interview.
"Here’s the challenge: without changing the open nature of Android, how do we help improve the whole world’s end-user experience?" Chrome chief Sundar …
Windows 8 'sales' barely half as good as Microsoft claims
Don't even mention the XP/Vista sales comparisons
Microsoft claimed last week that it's made '100 million' Windows 8 sales and the claim has been widely repeated. But channel feedback and the experience on the ground point to a very different picture.
The Guardian's Charles Arthur has made a stab at estimating the true figure, and suggests it's much less, at between 57 million …
What freetard are you: Justified, transgressor or just honest?
Analysis Ofcom has you pigeonholed
New research commissioned by UK uber-regulator Ofcom confirms that a tiny number of Brits are responsible for most of the copyright piracy in Blighty - and they're predominantly male and wealthy.
But you knew that already.
However, the ambitious study has tried something new. It attempted for the first time to create a field …
Setanta, ESPN couldn't make UK footie TV work. How will BT Sport?
By giving it all away? Um, let's take a look
Having acquired the TV rights to top-flight sports for £736m, BT is to give much of it away to its broadband punters at no extra cost - or indeed to anyone who wants to pony up just a few quid a week.
Last year, the telco shelled out millions for the rights to show 38 Premier league football matches live over a three-year period …
Nokia's debuts new 'Fastlane' UI in $99 flagship Asha 501
Hopes to prop up ailing low-end biz, fend off Landfill Android™ avalanche
Nokia has unveiled a new UI in the flagship $99 Asha 501 to help fend off a dramatic collapse in sales of the low-end devices.
Strong sales of cheap but decent quality Asha in growth markets like China and Africa had helped the fallen Finnish giant weather a tumultuous transition to Windows Phone, which saw its smartphone sales …
Spotify spews 'unencrypted' FREE MP3s all over creation
Chrome tool could ransack music vault, says coder
Spotify has tweaked the music player on its website after someone apparently found a way to harvest every single MP3 file from the audio-streaming service.
The media biz's playback site, which launched in November, did not encrypt data streamed to the listener's web browser, it is claimed. One enterprising programmer said he …
Review: BlackBerry Q10
Not cheap, but a most excellent Communicator
One of my four-year-olds pointed to a BlackBerry Bold recently and exclaimed "It's HALF A PHONE!". She was pointing at the screen. And the other half? The answer, I elicited later, was that it was some kind of letters game.
Just think about that for a moment. Every day of your life you've seen adults pawing at a phone, but only …
The Metro experiment is dead: Time to unleash Windows Phone+
Analysis How Microsoft can capture the mobile market - properly
Is this the moment for Windows Phone 8, the overlooked diamond in the Redmond rough, to shine?
Now that Microsoft bigwigs have realised that cramming their desktop operating system into a touchscreen tablet format was unwise, to put it generously, how about scaling up the smartphone cousin to capture the exploding mobe market …
Secret UN 'ZOD' climate deliberations: UK battles to suppress details
Lone engineer battles climate science Omertà
Can the Internet help climate scientists? Not everyone thinks so.
"The Internet is a double-edged sword," Met Office scientist Peter Stott told a London courtroom last week. "There's a whole cacophony of voices on blogs, people with different opinions and people very motivated to dig around. But not in the 'big picture' details …
BlackBerry infrastructure hit by ANOTHER outage
Messages slip out from insular diehard community
BlackBerry says an outage hit network customers today, but claims that services are getting back to normal.
UK readers told us that BlackBerry network services died at 10am this morning. BlackBerry confirmed the problems via Twitter three hours later and provided us with this statement:
We can confirm that our technical teams …
The UK's copyright landgrab: The FAQ
Analysis Everything you wanted to know about the Instagram Act, but were afraid to ask
The UK has passed legislation to permit the mass use of copyright-protected material without the owner's permission. This applies to any copyrighted work - not just images - where identifying information is missing.
The specifics aren't yet known - they'll come later in the year, in the form of secondary legislation called a " …
Judge of EU beauty contest for 'sexy' startups is VC backer of winner
Comment 'Oh dear', says EC after Steelie Neelie blush gush
The European Commission has sponsored an award in which a VC was part of a panel that gave the top prize to one of his firm's investments. The first ever Europioneers Awards, presented by EC Vice-President Neelie Kroes, crowned the founders of two European startups, SwiftKey and SoundCloud, as "Young European Tech Entrepreneurs …
UK.Gov passes Instagram Act: All your pics belong to everyone now
Everyone = Silicon Valley ad platforms tech companies
Have you ever uploaded a photo to Facebook, Instagram or Flickr?
If so, you'll probably want to read this, because the rules on who can exploit your work have now changed radically, overnight.
Amateur and professional illustrators and photographers alike will find themselves ensnared by the changes, the result of lobbying by …
Review: Nokia Lumia 520
At last - an alternative to Landfill Android
A few years ago the late music magazine The Word coined the phrase "landfill indie" to describe the thousands of generic groups it encountered. Today the shops are full of "landfill Android": utterly generic, non-too-inspiring handsets. It’s into this Valley of Death that Nokia tosses its new Lumia 520.
In the UK, the average …
EE: Of course we're going to get 1m 4G users by the end of the year!
Brave numerical spinning by EE, but is it enough?
Everything Everywhere put a brave spin on its latest 4G numbers today and insisted it was on course for its goal of 1 MEEEELION users by the end of the year.
With its new LTE network criticised for being buggy, patchy, and wildly overpriced, EE has nevertheless found 318,000 punters to step up to the plate. These include …
Make cool shows, make money: Netflix's SHOCKING TV strategy
'Internet TV' biz counts House of Cards gamble winnings
Netflix added 2 million US subscribers and made a profit of $2.69m (£1.77m) in the first quarter of 2013, buoyed by its critically acclaimed exclusive drama House of Cards.
The DVDs-by-post company now bills itself as an “internet television network” and is edging up in US customer numbers - its subscribers now almost equal …
Review: Nokia Lumia 720
Ah, a battery life just like the old days
Nokia completed its Windows 8 range with two new models recently, including this midrange offering the 720. With a choice of five Lumias it's now clearer to see what Nokia hopes to achieve.
The 720 strikes me as the Ford Cortina of the Lumias, a well made mass market compact. The 720 has everything going for it except, perhaps, …
BlackBerry OS 10.1 leaks its secret goo over all the web
Half-baked next version to try, if you're mad enough
A work-in-progress build of the next BlackBerry OS, version 10.1, has leaked onto the interwebs.
This latest update is due to ship this month to coincide with the planned launch of the BlackBerry Q10, a touchscreen phone with a QWERTY physical keyboard. This model follows its all-touchscreen cousin the Z10, which went on sale in …
More and more likely that double CO2 means <2°C: New study
Yes, it warms the planet - just not as much as thought
The results of a new approach to calculating the effect of CO2 - using empirical observations - suggest it has a lower impact on the climate than previously thought, and its effects are being over-estimated by the IPCC.
Publishing in the American Meterological Society's Journal of Climate, a new paper called An improved, …
How to save UK's open data: Meet the 'Fair Value Licence'
Comment Data hippies! Stop singing Kumbaya and get real
The Royal Mail's postcode database is to be privatised and campaigners for "open data" are furious.
But they only have themselves to blame; the open data campaign has been conducted with staggering utopian naivety. I strongly support the idea of opening up public datasets and I'm going to explain how open data can succeed, …
Nokia: OK, Q1 has been weak, but there's 'underlying' profit
Budget phone lines might yet save the day
Nokia warned of a weaker first quarter last year and duly delivered. Sales were €5.85bn in Q1 2013 with an operating loss of €150m.
Net phone sales were down 32 per cent year on year, with 6.1 million smartphones shifted in the first three months of the year, of which 5.6 million were Lumia Windows phones.
In Q4 Nokia shifted …
UK's first copyright swap-shop for cat pics (etc) still yonks away
You know you need to buy the rights for that, yes?
The UK's Copyright Hub, designed for high-volume legit trading of copyrighted material, will launch in July.
Ultimately the service will allow individual Brits to, for example, easily license music to use in wedding videos, cat photos for calendars or illustrations for books. But not just yet.
Its chairman Richard Hooper …
UK Supreme Court backs news leech in copyright fight
But asks EU court to give final say on browser cache scuffle
The UK's Supreme Court has sided with a technology company and a public relations industry group in a long-running copyright case - but bounced it up to Europe for ultimate clarification.
The decision (PDF) by the court offers a temporary respite for the Meltwater Group, a parasitic news scraper-cum-headline aggregator, after a …
Are biofuels Europe's sh*ttiest idea ever?
Analysis Famine-causing ... and not even environmentally friendly
The craze for biofuels* - a part of EU legislation for a decade** now - is costing Europeans a fortune and isn't even environmentally friendly, a new report (PDF) by renowned British thinktank Chatham House argues.
In the name of "climate change reduction", the EU passed a mandate requiring 10 per cent of transport energy to …
Will Google's rivals swallow the 'labelling remedy' pill?
Analysis Web giant's in Europe now, where complainants count
Google will have a green light to offer "manipulated" search results and "to discriminate against competitors" if its preferred competition remedy is accepted by the EU, at least according to 39 national consumer bodies in Europe.
We don't yet know the specifics of the terms Google offered (and that the European Commission will …
Most brain science papers are neurotrash: Official
Don't believe everything you read
A group of academics from Oxford, Stanford, Virginia and Bristol universities have looked at a range of subfields of neuroscience and concluded that most of the results are statistically worthless.
The researchers found that most structural and volumetric MRI studies are very small and have minimal power to detect differences …
Half of US smartphone owners have no idea which mobe to buy next
What was that about platform lock-in?
Were "ecosystems" of apps and developers ever the clincher in the smartphone wars? The conventional wisdom is that once users are locked in an online software store they will never leave. Perhaps this stickiness has been oversold.
Now 44 per cent of 1,500 smartphone owners surveyed by MKM Partners in the US aren't sure which …
The gloves are on: Nokia emits super-sensitive £99 Windows Phone
Along with svelte sibling
Nokia's sub-£100 Lumia 520 has rolled out in the UK this week, alongside a keenly priced and attractive unibody sibling, the Lumia 720. Both were announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February.
The Lumia 620 put a modern Nokia at a price point under £150, but now the slightly larger size has made it even cheaper. …
Vinyl sales reach 15 year high, Blighty becomes No. 3 music buyer
You just can't trust that singing fat lady
The UK overtook Germany as the world's third largest music market last year, according to the yearbook from trade association IFPI. The USA and Japan remain the largest two music nations.
Revenues from music recordings were about the same as last year - $16.4bn - but a slow shift from physical (down 5 per cent) to legit internet …
Facebook VOICE is what telco barons should fear - not a Zuckermobe
Analysis Just killed a chicken, now your profits are next... bitch
Facebook disappointed anyone expecting the unveiling of a "Facebook phone" last week - including me. But device manufacturers and mobile operators should watch their backs: it's barely the start of what the social-networking website can achieve.
As a thought experiment, put yourself in Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg's Adidas …
Brit musos now trouser more crumpled fivers from online music than radio
Annual British royalties cheque check
For the first time, online services are dishing out more money to British songwriters and composers than radio. Music authors bagged £641.8m last year worldwide from the performance of their music, up 1.7 per cent from 2011. The annual figures (PDF) from the Performing Rights Society (aka "PRS for Music" - still) provide an …
Building the actual real internet simply doesn't pay
Analysis Those fat pipes and extra Gs don't come cheap
It isn’t unicorns that keep the internets running, but eye-watering amounts of capital investment by infrastructure operators. However a substantial chunk of that investment never pays for itself and most of it barely repays the cost of the capital, reckons consultancy PwC.
The telco industry as a whole spends $320bn on …
Prime Ministerial exploding cheese expert to become 'entrepreneur'
'Visionary' who gave us the Magic Silicon Roundabout
Rohan Silva, the Downing Street wonk behind the fabulous soaraway Silicon Roundabout, is leaving politics to join a venture-capital firm closely associated with his biggest initiative.
As the Prime Minister's 33-year-old special policy advisor, Silva branded the name Tech City on the cluster of small businesses huddled around …
BitTorrent opens kimono, gets out one-to-many streaming tool
Has Bram finally cracked what the BBC couldn't?
BitTorrent’s live streaming protocol has finally emerged into the daylight after years of development. The beta program is now public. You can try it.
The broadcast data is assigned to small groups - "clubs" - which then share the stream with a UDP protocol. Congestion control is added at the last hop.
There’s more detail in …
Entire internet credits snapper for taking great pic while actually dead
He was good, says bloke who really took it, but come on
One of the web's best loved classic photographs - universally credited to the great photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson - was taken just six years ago, quite some time after Cartier-Bresson's death. Let's meet the bloke who snapped it.
It's an atmospheric image of a girl and a dog on a beach, with a storm brewing in background …
Torygraph and Currant Bun stand by to repel freeloaders
It's a paywall - like the one at the grocer
The Daily Telegraph is to begin charging regular web readers for web access.
The Telegraph doesn't use the term 'paywall' in its announcement, which is fair enough, really. The P-word is really a propaganda word, as the FT's M B Christie has pointed out: "Why don't we call it paying for content, just like paying for milk or …
Not got 4G? There's a reason we aren't called 'Four', sniffs Three
Want 4G and battery life? It's called HSDPA+, and it's 3 G
Ofcom designed its 4G auction so there would be four winners - but the UK's fourth player is in no rush to turn on 4G-LTE.
In fact, it thinks 3G connectivity is not all that different from 4G.
Three UK says its 4G mobile broadband service will go live later rather than soon. UK CEO David Dyson said today that the upgrade would …
After Leveson: The UK gets an Orwellian Ministry of Truth for real
Analysis Cause, an untrue news report. Guardian, though, not NotW
Ever wondered what a British coup d’état might look like? You’ll have to bring your own visuals, but the soundtrack would probably go like this ...
“Other than an Index of Censorship press release, where is your evidence for '300 years' of freedom?” demands one Reg comment-poster after your correspondent suggested MPs had ended …
Furious Stephen Fry blasts 'evil' Reg and 'TW*T' Orlowski
'I'm NOT upset. Anyway I've got more Twitter followers. HA'
Official British National Treasure Stephen Fry has responded to El Reg teasing last week with an emotional defence of his TV voice-over work, in two impassioned audio burps this weekend.
"It doesn't upset me," Fry insists. "I am a voice-over artist, I have read every one of the Harry Potter novels - and I'm proud to have done so …
Freetard den isoHunt loses appeal against search ban
But owner no longer prohibited from getting a proper job
Canadian file-sharing website isoHunt has lost an appeal against a court injunction that required it to filter out searches for copyrighted material. Canadian national Gary Fung, who operated the site, was ordered to filter searches for BitTorrent downloads in 2010. He was also prohibited from using the terms in the website's …
The UK Energy Crisis in 3 simple awareness-raising pictures
Wrap up and think of Gaia
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. If that’s true, we’re about to save you reading 3,000. The UK is running out of gas. Very rapidly indeed. So much so, that shortly after Easter cuts and rationing may be introduced, with industrial users and hospitals getting preferential treatment.
This month is the coldest March in …
Dongle smut Twitstorm claims second scalp
Possible blokey jokey sees cross woman in pink slip
Life can imitate a Charlie Brooker drama, after all.
A programmer who made a "dongle" joke at a Python developers' conference has been fired, unleashing a Twitter lynch mob. His feminist accuser has also been fired after her employer suffered a DDoS attack.
"Women in technology need consistant [sic] messaging from birth through …
News scraper Meltwater loses US court case
Paltry traffic ruled no compensation for lost fees
Headline-scraper Meltwater has lost another court case, this time in the US. The Associated Press brought the case in a federal court, with Judge Denise Cote arguing that the service had stolen an unfair advantage over its rivals by refusing to take out a license for headlines and excerpts.
In 2011 the aggregator lost a case in …
