We've had what appear to be official quotes and even official looking pics, but nothing on what'll be going inside the Asus Eee 904 – the little laptop in a bigger laptop's body.

Now, though, What Laptop has come up with 'official' details on the specifications – and a launch price: £269, including VAT. That would make it a good deal cheaper than the same-size, but larger screened Eee PC 1000 , which is expected to cost well over £300 when it goes on sale later in the year.

The wind seems to have dropped out of the MacBook Air's sails, despite its status as the slimmest laptop currently on the shelves. A price cut could be just the thing to give it its puff back and so, with SSD prices tumbling, Apple's taking a cool £300 off.

Taking a red pen to the 1.8GHz 64GB SSD model's old £2,028 price tag, it'll now sell at a more comfortable £1,719 with all its original specs intact. The 1.6GHz 80GB hard drive model stays fast, though, at £1,199.

There's no doubt that SSDs are falling faster than house prices so we wouldn't be surprised to see a few more price chops before the year is out.

[The Register]

Okay, not quite but if you’re looking to pick up a new smartphone in the next three months, the odds are better than evens that you’ll plump for Apple’s new toy – at least according to a survey conducted by RBC Capital Markets.

When asked, 56% of around 3,600 members of RBC’s Technology Adoption Panel expressed a preference for the iPhone 3G. This contrasts with a figure of just 35% that emerged from a similar survey conducted by RBC before the announcement of the 3G model.

You’ll find more fun iPhone 3G forecasts after the jump.

You could soon be using your mobile to pay for a loaf of bread or a newspaper, instead of fumbling for change or breaking into a twenty.

The GSM Association and the European Payments Council, which does the job of speaking for 8000 banks across the EU, have vowed to work together to bring micro payments to mobiles.

The technology, which could use the Near Field Communication technology already cropping up in handsets and trialled by companies such as Vivo Tech (picured), would likely work on a touch-to-pay basis. That would make it similar to London Transport's Oyster system or Barclaycard's OnePulse, which works with small purchases in shops in the capital.

Currently called Pay-Buy-Mobile, the GSM Association's initiative could potentially be a far larger Europe-wide system. It would be hoping to emulate the success of mobile phone payments in Japan, which have already taken off.

[The Register]

If such things excite you – and because it’s Apple, we imagine some folks will get far too excited by this – then here’s a nice picture of what appears to be a MobileMe consumer box.

It was posted by user MeckiM@c over at Flickr and is, according MeckiM@c, a snap of a MobileMe box sent by Apple to a friend. When this acquaintance called Apple’s support people to find out what it was all about, he was apparently told that it was sent by mistake and that a courier would be calling the next day to pick it up again. It wouldn't do to have such a mission-critical product out in the wild before time, after all. MobileMe isn't set to launch until next week.

That’s it really but, if you’re interested in some MobileMe background, there’s more about MobileMe after the jump.

Firefox's record for the number of downloads in a day as now been given official recognition from the people at Guinness.

It means the Guinness World Record for software downloads in a 24-hour period now stands at 8,002,530.

Gareth Deaves of Guinness World Records told the BBC it was "an extremely impressive accomplishment." The fact that no previous record ever actually existed didn't seem to dampen the mood at Firefox, with marketing head, Paul Kim praising the "enthusiasm and creativity of Firefox fans".

Firefox Download Day on 17th June marked the launch of the new Firefox 3. Since then it's been downloaded a total of 29 million times, which should help Firefox break through the 20% mark for share of browser users by the end of the month.

[BBC]

As explained in our review, a problem with the way in which some MSI Wind U100 retail units respond to a fully depleted battery means that they need a BIOS update straight from the box. The problem is that BIOS updates need to be run from floppy disk and the MSI Wind, just like the Acer Aspire One and Asus Eee PC, doesn’t have a floppy drive.

An external USB floppy drive is one option, but surely it’s easier to make a bootable USB flash drive and boot the netbook from that, right? Wrong. While netbooks (and most laptops) can be booted from a USB flash drive, the catch is that you still need a bootable DOS floppy to create one...

What's better than a Nokia N810 Internet tablet? A Nokia N810 Internet tablet running Google's Android.

Folks on the Internet Tablet Talk forum have unearther the secret - and made installation as simple as loading up a standard app. Touchscreen, browser and maps are all reported to be working.

Step one is to download android.img.bz2 from here or here to the tablet's memory card. Then download and install android-installer.deb from here or here.

Then just reboot and hit the Android icon that will have appeared in the Nokia's extras menu. Simple. Just in case, the forum also has instructions for removing it and re-installing the original Nokia kernel.

[ITT forum]

You've tried the spring loaded fake chewing gum packet, grown tired of the foam brick and laid more plastic turds than is frankly healthy for a grown adult. What you need, our prankster-loving friend, is this new USB drive.

Not a USB drive in the conventional sense. It actually holds less data than a floppy disk (none to be precise) but does have one unique feature - free electric shock therapy.

Just pass to a bystander, instruct them to remove the cap and wait for the 'hilarious reaction' as jolts of electricity surge through their fingers.

Not enough to erase childhood memories perhaps - but enough to satisfy any devilish urges to inflict pain on innocent colleagues. Beware, though, the makers say it's not recommended for, "persons with any medical conditions" - we don't want you being responsible for any 'early retirements' now, do we?

[Sourcing Map]

Solid state drives rank up there with caviar and Russian girlfriends as expensive luxuries you can probably live without but OCZ has just unveiled three new models it says are 50% cheaper than similar high speed offerings currently on the market.

The 2.5" Core Series SATA II drives come in 32, 64 and 128GB sizes and will set you back £125, £199 and £349 respectively. That's still a healthy premium on conventional drives but probably at least slightly less eye watering than your last utility bill.

OCZ says they'll be in the UK via Ebuyer, Dabs and Aria within a week or so.

[HEXUS,channel]