Airlines should scrap in-flight entertainment systems because they cannot compete with the thousands of songs and scores of movies that can be stored on modern media players, according to an aviation expert.

The pace at which airlines can update the selection of film, music, games and technology offered to passengers is being outstripped by constant advances in storage and functionality on media players, according to professor John Hansman, director of the International Technology Center for Air Transport at MIT.

The Ministry of Defence has awarded two comms contracts worth a total of £231m to General Dynamics UK.

The deals cover upgrading the UK Armed Forces' Bowman digital radios comms system and improving interoperability with other UK and Allied systems.

In the future, your mobile phone could become your holiday concierge, reminding you to check-in the minute you arrive at the airport or automatically ordering a taxi for you when your plane lands.

It's a vision that airline passengers could see become reality within the next 12 to 18 months, according to Jim Peters, CTO at airline IT supplier Sita.

June saw plenty of activity on the hardware and software fronts - including a peek at prototypes of a new kind of mobile gadget that's a cross between a smartphone and a netbook, from Freescale. The chipmaker was showing off so-called 'smartbook' prototypes at the Computex show in Taiwan. The design pictured above is intended for vertical displays.

Click here to see more smartbook prototypes.

Orange Business Services (OBS) has launched the pilot of a managed videoconferencing service that connects companies regardless of the vendor of their equipment or the type of network they are using.

Open Videopresence, which will be available on a monthly subscription, was unveiled at an event in Paris on Wednesday. The service can be used within and between companies, with meetings set up using an online portal or Microsoft Outlook. Orange can supply compatible equipment, although interoperability with other and older devices is part of the service.

Apple expects to have a fix later this month for a vulnerability in the iPhone that could allow an attacker to gain control of the device remotely via SMS, a security researcher said on Thursday.

An attacker could exploit a weakness in the way iPhones handle SMS messages to do things like use GPS to track the phone's location, turn on the microphone for eavesdropping, or take control of the device and add it to a botnet, Charlie Miller, co-author of The Mac Hacker's Handbook and principal security analyst at Independent Security Evaluators, said in a presentation at the SyScan conference in Singapore. The presentation was covered by IDG News Service.

Mobile applications are numerous but often lacking in quality. Quocirca's Rob Bamforth looks at what's needed to improve them.

"Mobile application stores - should they be controlled by handset manufacturers?"

British Airways CEO Willie Walsh has said the airline will not extend in-flight mobile comms to any of its aircraft already in service.

BA is currently planning to launch a mobile email, web browsing and texting service from OnAir on two new Airbus A318 aircrafts in September of this year.

Transform your iPhone into an office with our pick of handy apps.

Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite

Let silicon.com keep you up to date with all the latest CIO job moves and changes with our regular CIO Job Report.

CIO moves

Telecoms companies may tell us it's good to talk but they seem to be struck dumb when it comes to communicating with their own customers, according to a new poll.

In a survey asking 5,000 Brits to vote for UK businesses with the worst customer service half of the top 10 are telecoms companies.

While every man and his dog seems to be bringing out a smartphone at the moment, several devices stand out from the crowd. Here silicon.com rounds up the current crop of smartphone heavy-hitters - starting with Apple's iPhone 3G S, still the device all other manufacturers look to beat.

Apple's latest is known as the 3G S, with the S standing for speed, in the shape of a faster processor. It also has a better camera (3MP), a video recorder, a digital compass and even an anti-fingerprint coating on the screen for maximum shine.

Skype shed the beta tag on Monday to reveal version 3.0 of its VoIP application for Windows Mobile phones. Skype 3.0 for Windows Mobile is nearly identical to the beta build that preceded it but mobile Skype users graduating to it from version 2.5 will notice some major feature additions - notably the capability to transfer files and to send SMS messages.

File transferring and SMS are carryover features from desktop Skype and are initiated via relatively small buttons on the mobile interface that you can access from the contact list. Click the dark, round icon to send an SMS using Skype Credit, and select the grey drop-down arrow to select "send file".

Apple and other big phone makers have struck a deal with the European Commission to start selling phones with universal mobile phone chargers starting next year.

Under the agreement, manufacturers would start using micro-USB connections for phone chargers used for smartphones. Apple joins other big mobile phone makers including LG, Motorola, Nokia, RIM, Samsung and Sony Ericsson in agreeing to the new standard. Chipset makers, such as NEC, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments have also agreed to the deal.

The HTC Hero will be made available SIM-free in the UK on 15 July, as shown by its pre-order status on Amazon's UK site.

The Hero will cost £429.99 through the online retailer. The handset is the first Android-based phone not to be tied exclusively to one operator, and will be available in the UK through Orange and T-Mobile, as well as unlocked and SIM-free.

O2 has upgraded the wi-fi connection software for its mobile-broadband customers, making it possible for them to use BT's Openzone hotspots.

The update to O2's Connection Manager software and the BT Openzone deal, both announced on Monday, provide an additional 3,000 wi-fi hotspots to O2's mobile-broadband users. The operator already has 7,500 available, including its own hotspots and those belonging to partner The Cloud.

A quarter of techies can use their own iPhone for work with their employer's blessing, a new silicon.com reader poll has found.

The latest incarnation of Apple's touchscreen smartphone - the iPhone 3G S - launched earlier this month, selling more than a million units in its first three days, according to Apple.

Fifty billion connected devices are coming to cellular networks in the next decade, according to Ericsson - as everyday objects go mobile.

Ericsson's VP of systems architecture, Håkan Djuphammar, predicted the years to come could see connectivity spread to some of the very smallest household items.

A native application development kit has been released for Android developers, offering a way to create certain kinds of high-performing applications for handsets running the platform.

Android applications run through the Dalvik virtual machine, which emulates a Java virtual machine.

This is professor Kristina Höök, professor at the department of computer and systems science at Stockholm University. Höök heads up the Mobile Life Centre in Kista, Sweden, where a team of academics have around 21 million Swedish kronor (£1.63m) per year in funding until 2017 to research and develop the next generation of mobile services.

The team works closely with tech companies, including Ericsson, Microsoft, Sony Ericsson and Scandinavian mobile operator TeliaSonera, to explore how mobile apps and services could evolve in the coming years.

The BBC is using the latest online technology to boost its coverage of this weekend's Glastonbury music festival, which starts today.

The BBC Glastonbury website received more than 600,000 visitors in the week around Glastonbury in 2008 - a figure the Beeb hopes to beat this year.

Does the UK's new mobile phone directory go far enough to protect your privacy? Lawyer Ruth Hoy weighs in.

Last week's launch of the UK's first mobile phone directory, which claims to be able to connect anyone to more than 16 million mobile users for a small charge, was always bound to ignite contention around privacy.

HTC's new Android-based Hero phone will also come with the ability to handle Flash elements that adorn many websites and power YouTube video.

Adobe Systems announced on Wednesday that its Flash Player will be built into the HTC phone, an important step in the company's efforts to spread Flash to mobile phones. The phone, one of several from HTC to use Google's open-source operating system, is scheduled to ship in Europe starting in July and in Asia and the US later in the year.

At a press event in London on Wednesday, HTC unveiled its latest Google Android device, the HTC Hero, featuring a new user interface called HTC Sense.

The HTC Hero will be available in Europe starting in July and in Asia later this summer, while a "distinct" US version will ship later in 2009. However, pricing was not announced at this time.

Android and iPhone developers looking for an extra source of revenue will soon have an advertising option, sponsored by Google.

Google's AdSense program - in which it sells and distributes ads to third-party publishers - is coming to mobile devices as a beta program, the company announced Wednesday. A small group of developers have been testing this program but now anyone can apply, said Susan Wojcicki, vice president of product management, in a blog post.

Global bank HSBC is now offering its business internet banking services to UK customers using the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch.

HSBC claims to be the first financial institution to offer this type of service on these mobile devices in the UK. The bank launched the service for BlackBerry devices in October last year.

CIOs spend countless hours listening to suppliers pitch their technology, so silicon.com decided to make the process a lot more entertaining by putting the vendors on the spot. Welcome to the 60-Second Pitch.

Suppliers have just one minute to pitch their product or service to a panel of current and former heads of IT, who then have the opportunity to quiz the vendor before giving the technology a green or red light - just for fun, of course.

Mobile operators have been blamed for holding back handset evolution by failing to understand the desires of consumers.

Asked why it took Mac maker Apple to come in to the industry and launch a phone designed with usability and data consumption as its watch words, Håkan Eriksson, senior VP and CTO of Ericsson, said the iPhone was born because Apple ignored the operators.

All new mobiles will be packing a RFID chip by summer 2010 - ultimately opening up the possibility of your phone also becoming the keys to your car or your house.

That's the prediction of Ericsson's VP of systems architecture, Håkan Djuphammar, speaking at the mobile infrastructure company's Business Innovation Forum in Stockholm on Tuesday.

Intel and Nokia have announced a long-term relationship that will see the development of Intel-powered, Linux-based, handheld mobile computing devices.

The deal between the chipmaker and handset manufacturer was announced on Tuesday. Intel and Nokia will collaborate on several open source mobile Linux software projects and Intel will license HSPA/3G modem intellectual property from Nokia, the companies said.

Nokia Siemens Networks will buy Nortel Networks' wireless technology business for $650m.

Nokia Siemens said on Friday it will use Nortel's CDMA and long term evolution (LTE) technology to expand its presence in the US. CDMA, (code division multiple access), is one of the two major networks operating in the US and is used by Verizon Wireless and Sprint. LTE is 4G wireless technology that will potentially replace today's mobile networks.

Competition in the smartphone market is heating up this summer as one new hot smartphone after another hits the street. The latest is T-Mobile's next Google Android device, called the myTouch.

T-Mobile is set to announce the new smartphone today. It is the second smartphone the carrier has introduced that uses Google's open-source mobile operating system, Android. T-Mobile introduced the world's first Google Android phone, called the G1, last autumn. And so far the company claims it has sold more than one million devices.

The government's Digital Britain scheme focuses squarely on the consumer. Natasha Lomas asks: so what about businesses?

During a half-hour question and answer session at the launch of the government's Digital Britain blueprint this week, the penultimate question fired at Lord Carter by the assembled press pack was, did the minister really feel the plan offers enough help for businesses?

IBM is to invest millions of dollars for research into new mobile services and capabilities.

The company said on Wednesday it is setting aside $100m over five years to "bring simple, easy-to-use services to the millions of people who have bypassed using the personal computer as their primary method of accessing the internet".

Apple has patched nearly four dozen security holes in the iPhone and iPod Touch with its iPhone OS 3.0 release, made available on Wednesday.

The 46 flaws could allow an attacker to bypass security restrictions, shut down an application, disclose sensitive information, conduct cross-site scripting and cross-site request forgery attacks, or take over the device, Apple said in an advisory.

The Digital Britain report has drawn criticism from politicians and technology experts over its proposals for dealing with fibre rollouts and illegal file-sharing.

The report, published on Tuesday, outlines the government's plans for the UK's telecommunications infrastructure and digital economy. Shortly after its publication, Jeremy Hunt, the Conservative Party's shadow secretary of state for culture, media and sport, called Digital Britain a "colossal disappointment" and lambasted the plan's proposal for a monthly 50p tax on fixed copper lines.

Communications minister Lord Carter has put the idea of mobile coverage on the London Underground back on the government agenda - only months after it emerged a planned Tube mobile trial had been shelved indefinitely.

Back in March, silicon.com revealed Transport for London (TfL) had quietly dropped plans for a six-month mobile Tube trial. The pilot, which was to have considered whether it would be technically and commercially viable for coverage to be extended across the entire Underground network, was shelved after TfL said it had not received any commercially "credible" proposals from the market.

On Tuesday, Opera Software released Opera Unite, its application platform for turning your computer into a server from which you can share photos, files, notes, music and websites.

Opera Unite's web server is a component of the latest experimental version of the Opera 10 browser - available for Windows, Mac and Linux. But viewers can access the content from any browser.

Many of the iPhone's long-awaited features will finally become a reality on Wednesday when Apple rolls out iPhone OS 3.0.

Current iPhone owners can download the software from iTunes for free, and iPod Touch users can get it as well, but for a fee of $9.95, just like the last OS update. What time exactly, we don't know yet. Apple will only say iPhone OS 3.0 will come out at some point on Wednesday.

The government has announced plans for a 50p per month levy on all fixed copper lines to fund the expansion of fibre broadband to areas where the market fears to tread.

The proposals come as part of the government's Digital Britain report - its blueprint for ensuring the UK does not become the laggard of the global digital economy.