We know you can’t get enough news about Asus’ cute little Eee PC, but what do you make of this latest picture of the world’s favourite UMPC? It’s an Eee PC in... pink!

Okay, so it’s not real. But what is apparently real are a series of images of a black Eee PC 901, posted over at the ever-reliable Blogeee.net. These new photos of a black Eee PC follow on from a similar set of images posted just last week, apparently showing a white-coloured Eee PC 901. As last time, we won’t embarrass ourselves by attempting word-perfect translations of Blogee’s French captions but, if you want to learn more do click the Read more link below.

The remnants of Rock Computers, which entered into administration earlier this month, have been acquired by an outfit called Stone Group.

In an announcement posted on the front page of Rock’s online home, Stone Group describes itself as an “IT provider to the public sector”. It states that it has bought the trade and assets of Rock for an “undisclosed consideration”. The statement continues: “The acquisition will enable Stone to offer a larger range of specialist high-end notebook products to its public sector customers. Stone will fully back the Rock brand going forward enabling the continued development of its market leading gaming technologies as well as securing full ongoing warranty support for existing customers.”

Here’s a worrying thought: that faulty/unwanted iPhone you returned to Apple has been refurbished and shipped out to a new customer with your personal data there for the taking.

Well, if the findings of iPhone hacker Jonathan Zdziarski are accurate, it appears to have happened. On his blog, Zdziarski details his efforts to recover data from a refurbished iPhone that came directly from Apple. He used his own “forensic toolkit” to extract all manner of personal data from the device.

We’re still waiting to get our hands on the MSI Wind ultra-portable (“this month”, according to MSI), but Japanese tech site Impress has scored a review with its diminutive desktop sibling – also called the Wind.

If you’re wondering why this is interesting, it’s because that like the MSI Wind laptop, the dinky Wind desktop also uses an Intel Atom processor and Impress has run some benchmarks to assess its performance. The bad news is that the Google translation of the site doesn’t shed much light on Impress’ thoughts, but the good news is that there is a less linguistically challenging benchmarks results table.

Look, this is just another rumour but it’s as good as they get: the mucho-respected Gizmodo has apparently been told by someone “very, very close” to the 3G iPhone's launch that Apple will announce the new model during a keynote speech at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on 9th June.

The Gizmodo story goes on to say that the 3G iPhone will be on sale in Spain from June 18th, at the opening of Telefonica's Madrid megastore. There’s more speculation but, as that’s all it appears to be, we’ll leave the rest to Gizmodo. You know where to click.

[via Gizmodo]

Blogger Russell Davies – no, not that one – professes a newfound passion for customising high-tech gear in a low-tech fashion.

Having already crafted his mobile phone into a Warhammer accessory, the non-Doctor-Who-related Davies has now turned his Apple Macbook into a blackboard. His logic seems to be that the Macbook takes too long to power up when he wants to make quick notes so, by resurfacing the lid with blackboard paint, he now has an instantaneous note-taking device (well, instantaneous so long as there’s some chalk around; which should be fine so long as his local pub offers Wi-Fi by the pool table).

Still, not everyone likes it. Our favourite of the many comments about the hack: "what were you thinking> were you high? you just ruined your laptop. I'll give it a week tops until you figure out that it was a bad idea. DUMB!"

[Russell Davies' blog]

With OLPC mark 1 barely six months old, founder Nicholas Negroponte unveiled his vision of the next model during a conference at OLPC’s Global Country Workshop in Massachusetts yesterday.

The XO-2 is a radical departure from the function-first design of the current XO-1 – it’s about half the size, and the slim folding case has touch-screens top and bottom that can be used both as dual-displays, or a more traditional screen and keyboard arrangement.

To the sound of at least half-a-dozen yawns Nokia and Konami have jointly announced that some of the latter’s game franchises will be remade for the former’s tainted N-Gage gaming platform.

Or to put it another way – and specifically to put it the way the Konami version of the press release puts it – “Konami will begin provisioning of Metal Gear Solid Mobile for Nokia's mobile game service, N-Gage, scheduled to start in late June 2008. Metal Gear Solid Mobile is original content created exclusively for the mobile platform and based on the Metal Gear series”.

The launch of Windows Mobile 6.1 came and went at the beginning of April without too much fuss. The odd news story appeared here and there, but few people paid too much attention to this minor revision to Microsoft’s mobile operating system. Now that phones with the new mobile operating system are beginning to trickle out though, is that situation likely to change? Not if the Asus P320 is anything to go by...

Browser underdog Opera has released a ‘State of the Mobile Web’ report that focuses on the way that people use the internet when they’re out and about.

Unsurprisingly enough, the report focuses on the use of Opera Mini, Opera’s own mobile browser, but it still serves up some interesting overview stats. For example, the data-gatherers reckon that 40% of worldwide mobile web traffic is in some way related to social networking. This figure goes up to 63% in some territories, including America and Indonesia. By contrast, only a quarter of mobile web traffic is directed to portals and search engines.