Asus has postponed its £10 high-capacity battery upgrade offer for the Eee PC 900. Due to begin yesterday, the offer was designed to placate owners who were unhappy with performance of the Eee PC 900’s stock 4400mAh battery. 

Unfortunately, delays in battery shipments to the UK meant that Asus wasn’t able to start the offer as planned – much to the frustration of owners over at EeeUser who are already unhappy with the awkward handling of the offer.

Nokia has made the surprise announcement that it will be buying out the rest of its fellow Symbian shareholders - and taking the operating system open source.

Nokia, which currently owns a 48% stake, will be buying the rest for just under £309 million. It then plans to join other Symbian manufacturers, networks and chip makers to form the Symbian Foundation to develop the software.

The foundation will see Nokia pool its Series 60 assets with Sony Ericsson and Motorola's UIQ and NTT DoCoMo's MOAP to create a new Symbian Platform by next year.

The move should allow Symbian to better compete with Google's open source Android and marks another brave step for the OS, which has its roots in British firm Psion. Misty eyed Series 3 fans will remember it developed Symbian's forerunner, EPOC, before finally selling its stake in Symbian Ltd to Nokia in 2004.

[BBC]

Half the point of owning an iPhone is the generous unlimited data package - a factor that's set to come into its own with the 3G version. But with it has come a warning, from the Times, about browsing the web while abroad.

TimesOnline points out that O2 will be charging nearly £3/MB for roaming within the EU and almost £6/MB for the rest of the world. In other words, a single minute of cat-falling-in-a-pond hilarity on YouTube could end up costing you up to £12 when you get back home.

Our advice: leave the phone set to the default "Data Roaming Off" setting when you venture abroad. The cat can wait.

The camera phone megapixel race has begun, and while Sony Ericsson may be winning with its 8.1MP C905, Motorola is closing the gap with this 5MP effort, the Motozine ZN5.

Sony Ericsson of course has the expertise of Sony to fall back on so Motorola, not yet renowned for its imaging prowess, has teamed up with Kodak to beef up the ZN5's credentials...

Back in November we were told that handsets sporting Google's Android OS would be popping up 'by the second half of 2008'. Well, June is here and nearly gone and still no Android phones to speak of - bar some early demonstration sets .

Now the Wall Street Journal reports that Android has indeed hit some unforeseen delays, pushing things back to the final quarter of the year - or possibly even into early 2009.

Networks seem to have run into problems customising Android for their own mobile Internet portals, while software developers are complaining that Google has been moving the goal posts with changes to Android while software is in mid development.

The WSJ quotes Google's director of mobile platforms, Andy Rubin, as saying: "This is where the pain happens... We are very, very close." Just how close remains to be seen.

[Reuters]

Forget pico projectors, a company in India is promising to have the first mobile phones with holographic projectors ready within two years.

Infosys says the handsets will think nothing of beaming and screening 3D films, games and objects - and could even help accident investigators, teachers and doctors in their work.

It's all down to Fourier algorithms, which we won't pretend to understand, but a useful phrase to drop into conversation nevertheless.

[Pocket Lint]

Asus supplied us with a black Eee PC 901 with Windows XP a couple of days ago, which means we were finally able to finish our battery testing – the early Windows drivers on our first review model meant that our first batch of battery results were tentative.

The good news is that there’s a staggering increase in battery life once the Intel Atom processor’s power-saving features kick in. We’ve revised the original review accordingly, but you can read more about the final battery tests – and see some more images of the black Eee PC 901 – after the cut.

Toshiba's been busy knocking out not only the world's first laptop with a 128GB SSD, but also the first series of laptops with dedicated processors for upscaling DVDs to HD quality.

The 12.1in Portégé R500-S5007V is the model getting the 128GB SSD makeover. Having all that solid state memory onboard does bump the price up to $2,999 in the US, but that's still less than Apple charges for the 64GB SSD version of its MacBook Air, which sells for $3,146 in the States.

Toshiba also claims that, at 1.09kg, it's "the world’s lightest laptop with a 128GB SSD and DVD SuperMulti drive." Given that it's just about the only laptop with that combination you could also argue that it's the heaviest, but you get the point.

It was aiming for five million but it looks like Firefox makers, Mozilla, smashed that on its Firefox 3 Download Day. While it awaits confirmation from Guinness, Mozilla is claiming it's set a new world record of 8.3 million downloads in just 24 hours.

And though the first 24 hours may be over, the downloads continue. The current total now stands at a whopping 13.7 million, with the UK contributing a healthy 0.5 million all by itself. That puts it ahead of France and Spain on 4.7 million apiece, but trailing Germany who not only made short work of Portugal (61,000) last night but have also downloaded Firefox a table-topping 1.1 million times.

Current world champions, though, are the US with 4 million downloads. Honourable mentions must also go to the 11 downloaders in Chad and the 29 in Turkmenistan. Bravo.

[Download Day official site]

Huawei, dongle maker extraordinaire, has unveiled its latest HSDPA-hungry creation, the E180. As well as carrying out its usual modem duties, it also packs a MicroSD card reader, capable of supporting cards of up to 8GB in capacity - neatly doing away with the need for a separate memory stick for your files.

At a mere 10mm thick, with an "innovative swivelling USB conector", Huawei claims it's the world's thinnest HSDPA modem. It supports standard uplink speeds of up to 5.76Mbps and downloads up to a speedy 7.2Mbps. Apple fans will be pleased to know it's also Mac friendly.

With Huawei dominating the rebadge 3G dongle market, expect to see it wearing your network's logo when it goes on sale at the end of the month.

[Press release]