I got my hands on the Palm Pre yesterday – a smooth, black smartphone that has been likened to a “polished riverstone”. Don’t try and skim it, I was advised. Three years in the making, the Pre represents Palm’s attempt to get back to the top of the smartphone league, after being left behind by Apple’s iPhone and the Blackberry. The company popularised personal digital assistants in the 1990s with product such as the Palm [...]

For generations, hundreds of thousands of pupils have spent the end of the school year in gymnasiums scrawling answers to the sound of the ticking clock. And every summer they have endured a nerve-wracking two-month wait for their results. Exams have been a rite of passage for millions, but within a decade they could be consigned to history, according to one of the most senior figures in the system. Simon Lebus, chief executive of Cambridge [...]

Facebook has decided not to remove groups that deny the Holocaust. This policy contradicts its own “statement of rights and responsibilities”, which clearly states “you will not post content that is hateful”. Facebook seems to be ignorant of the inherent danger of Holocaust denial, the deeply hateful nature of it, and international efforts against racism. It either fails to understand the responsibility it has to society, or it has placed profit far above morality. Holocaust [...]

A controversial service which allows connection to millions of mobile phone numbers in an online directory has been suspended, just weeks after it was launched. The 118 800 service, which charges up to £1 to put people in touch with a mobile number from its list, went live in June. Since then it has been deluged with people trying to remove their details from the system. The site had caused concerns about privacy after it [...]

Microsoft started to publicise details of Microsoft Office 2010, aka Office 14*, at its Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans today. The main news is that Microsoft Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010 “have reached the technical preview engineering milestone”. These are pre-beta versions, not suitable for production use. There should be a public beta later this year, with the final release “in the first half of 2010″. For the first [...]