Following on from our earlier story about hacked-off HTC users banding together to launch legal action against the company, HTC has issued a statement that confirms the lack of hardware-accelerated graphics drivers, but refuses to acknowledge the fact as any kind of problem.

The company says that products like the TyTN II and Touch Cruise “do not use ATI’s Imageon video-acceleration hardware”. This, of course, was the core complaint made by newly-formed pressure-group HTCClassAction.org .

But while acknowledging the absence of proper hardware-accelerated drivers, the remainder of the statement suggests that HTC is in no mood for compromise.

If Santa left an iPhone in your Xmas stocking (or an iPod Touch, for that matter), you may still be wrestling with its syncing capabilities. Both the iPhone and the iPod Touch use iTunes to synchronise both music and 'info' - iTunes' term for appointments, contacts, and so on.

The problem is that if you use your home PC for music synchronisation, but your work PC for your calendar and contacts (probably with Outlook), it's difficult to avoid wiping one or the other types of content whenever you sync with either PC. Difficult, but not impossible -- here's how.

HTC is taking two steps backward for every one forward, according to a bunch of disgruntled users of the company’s mobile products. Indeed, so annoyed are these users that they’re intending launching a class-action lawsuit to force HTC to act.

What’s the problem? Well, the band behind HTCClassAction.org claims that some of HTC’s costliest gadgets and gizmos are “grossly underperforming”. The group reckons that HTC handhelds like the innovative TyTN II operate slower than two-year-old products from the same firm. 

The laptop stolen last week in Birmingham wasn’t the first that the MoD has lost, Defence Minister Des Brown has admitted – two other laptops containing encrypted data have gone missing since 2005.

In a debate in the House of Commons today, Brown stated that this latest discovery was made during an internal investigation into the wider security issues raised by this latest theft. It turns out that a Royal Navy laptop was stolen from a car in Manchester in October 2006, and an Army recruiting laptop, containing details of about 500 individuals, was stolen from a careers office in Edinburgh in December 2005.

The police have launched an inquiry after a Ministry of Defence laptop containing unencrypted details of 600,000 applicants to the armed forces was stolen. According to a report by BBC News, the theft took place in Edgbaston, Birmingham after a junior Royal Navy officer left the laptop in his car overnight on Wednesday 9 January.

"The stolen laptop contained personal information relating to some 600,000 people who have either expressed an interest in, or have joined, the Royal Navy, Royal Marines and the Royal Air Force," reads a statement on the MOD’s website.

Yes, it'll make you look like a cinema usherette, but if you don't mind a queue forming while you work, the Connect-A-Desk is a clever solution to the problem of how to use a laptop when there’s nowhere to sit. The gadget consists of a strap that goes around your neck and a tray that rests against your midriff. Your laptop then sits in an ideal position for typing and you can even walk around with it in place. Not bad for $34.95.

[Connect-A-Desk]

The web is awash with stories of how the iPhone has missed its sales targets in the UK, but the more negative pieces seem to be expressing a certain amount of glee with the information.

In a piece in the Financial Times, someone “familiar with the situation” states that O₂ has shifted 190,000 iPhones in the two months since it went on sale in November. The target, apparently, was 200,000 units, which means O₂ is 10,000 iPhones short – or just 5%.

Now any missed target is obviously a bad thing in business, but at the risk of sounding like an Apple apologist, is missing it by 5% (assuming those figures are correct – neither Apple nor O₂ will comment) really deserving of headlines with the words “disappoint” and “fails to impress”?

If your regular morning routine is to open half a dozen websites and spend half an hour so seeing what’s new, you’ve probably realised that the amount of new information published each day can soon outstrip the amount of time you have available to read it.

An RSS reader is one way to distil several (or even hundreds) of websites down into a readily digestible form, but they’re not much use for monitoring other online info. With the explosion of web-based email services, mailing lists, forums, weather forecasts, stocks and shares reports, photo galleries, streaming videos, social networking sites and everything in between, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to keep on top of everything. Unless, that is, you exploit yet another cunning bit of web technology – the aggregator.

We've taken a look at the five leading aggregators -- NetVibes, PageFlakes, MyYahoo, iGoogle and Microsoft Live. See what we thought after the cut. 

If you're currently throwing your spent batteries in the bin, it's time for a rethink. The 2006 EU Battery Directive states that 25% of spent household batteries will have to be recycled by 2012, rising to 45% by 2016. Given that only 2% are currently recycled (some 600 million are sent to landfill each year), there's some way to go.

Battery recycling programmes do exist, but if your local authority has yet to put something in place, waste battery collection organisation G&P Batteries has an inexpensive option. For a one-off £25 (plus VAT) payment, you'll be sent a cardboard BattBox into which go all your spent batteries. When full, G&P will collect the box and recycle its contents.

All types of batteries can be recycled - as long as they fit in the tissue box-size BattBox. So, you can dispose of everything from lithium button batteries to laptop batteries, but no car batteries -- though you can contact G&P for special collections.

[BattBox]

Palm first came up with the idea of a limited-functionality laptop-like companion for use with a smartphone, but widespread criticism led it to pull the flawed Foleo just weeks before its launch. If you're still hankering after an ultraportable that does nothing more than provide a larger screen and keyboard for your handheld's applications though, don't despair -- the Celio Corp Redfly may hit the spot.

Essentially a Foleo for Windows Mobile, the Redfly weighs just under a kilo and has an 8in, 800 x 480 screen, ¾-size keyboard and touchpad. The device has no usuer-accessible memory and serves no purpose by itself -- it merely provides a large-screen view on the applications already installed on your Windows Mobile smartphone and only models from HTC, Palm and Samsung are supported at the moment.

More details and a hands-on video demonstration after the cut.