It's two years since Google announced it was building an open mobile OS platform - and the number of smartphones with Android inside is on the up.

Sony Ericsson's first Android phone is a bit of a looker. The Xperia X10 runs version 1.6 of the Android OS - aka Donut - and is skinned with a propriety UI which the mobile maker says will be used for other Android devices in future.

The Home Office has announced a £39m deal to help emergency services comms cope during the London 2012 Olympic Games.

The National Police Improvement Agency has signed the £39m contract with Airwave, the company that provides the mobile radio network used by every UK police force and currently being rolled out to every ambulance trust and Fire and Rescue service in the country, to fund an increase in the system's capacity in time for the 2012 Games.

Customers are responsible for their own wi-fi security, according to hotspot operators.

BT Openzone, The Cloud and T-Mobile all recommended wi-fi users adopt VPNs to help protect themselves while using hotspots.

While Symbian continues to dominate the smartphone market it could soon be facing increasing competition from a new quarter - Maemo.

There's no debating that the Symbian platform remains the daddy of the smartphone world: one in every two sold today carries the Symbian OS.

The iPhone 3G and 3G S will go on sale to Orange customers from 10 November, the operator has revealed today.

Orange has also unveiled its pay monthly, pay-as-you-go and business tariffs for iPhone 3G and 3G S - with the cheapest price plan offering consumers a free iPhone 3G for just under £30 per month on a two-year contract.

Netbooks have been enjoying the spotlight of late - but are they suitable for the workplace? Bethan Jones puts one to the test.

Recently I was quietly enjoying my skinny hazelnut latte, extra foam, extra hot when my ears pricked up at the conversation at the table next to mine.

The European Commission has called for EU members to speed their switchover to digital television, and therefore in the process free up spectrum, which can then be used for broadband services.

Viviane Reding, information society and media commissioner for the EC, said she wants EU countries to have made the move by 2012.

Drivers with contactless bank cards will soon be able to use them to pay for their parking.

From next year, parking meters in the West End will accept contactless payments from motorists with wave and pay functionality built into their debit or credit cards.

Google this week released screenshots of Eclair, its 2.0 Android update.

Eclair update will add a unified email inbox. On previous Android phones, users have complained about the disparate experience between the various email apps.

Apple's iPhone might be seen by many as largely a consumer device, with games and media apps regularly topping the 'What's Hot' list on iTunes.

However, the App Store currently stocks more than 2,000 business apps and, with the iPhone currently dominating around 13 per cent of the smartphone market, the device's potential as a business tool can no longer be ignored. Here we take a look at some of the best business apps that can help turn your iPhone into a portable office.

Amazon's Kindle e-book and Google's Book Search will change the way we read books forever. And that will keep the lawyers plenty busy, says Callum Sinclair.

The internet, as the daddy of all disruptive technologies, heralded a new era of litigation. Now with Amazon's Kindle e-book reader available internationally - in the UK and some 100 other countries - and all the controversy over the Google Book Search settlement, it looks like e-book readers are the next space for legislative upheaval.

Augmented reality? Is this another name for Apple CEO Steve Jobs' infamous reality distortion field? Nice try but no. Augmented reality (AR) means overlaying computerised elements, such as graphics or text, on top of a real-time video or other real-world display with the aim of providing additional information to the viewer.

That sounds pretty abstract - do you have a few examples? The most basic examples of AR can be seen on televised sports games, where scores are overlaid on match footage, or digital annotations are added to show the trajectory of the ball or highlight a particular player.

While out and about in London, Peter Cochrane discovers there's an awful lot of unsecured wi-fi on offer, you just have to dig around.

CIOs spend hours listening to suppliers pitch their latest technology. How would these vendors fare with just one minute to get their message across?

silicon.com turns up the heat and gives vendors only 60 seconds to impress a panel of CIOs with their products. The IT chiefs then quiz them before delivering their verdict on the technology in the form of a red or green light.

Today's increasingly feature-packed smartphones are likely to propel the use of augmented reality into the mainstream in the coming years.

Augmented reality - the process of superimposing digital information or objects onto real-time video streams in order to create the illusion that they are part of the physical scene - will be pulling in revenues of more than $350m by 2014, up from $6m in 2008, according to analyst ABI Research.

Nokia is suing Apple over the alleged infringement of 10 of its patents.

According to the Finnish mobile maker, Apple's iconic iPhone device infringes on the patents relating to wireless handsets. Nokia said it is suing Apple because of the iPhone maker's refusal to licence the patents.

2009 may not be over yet but analysts have already revealed the top 10 strategic techs that CIOs should be looking at next year.

According to Gartner, the 10 strategic technologies will have an impact on the enterprise over the next three years, with IT chiefs encouraged to make decisions on them within the next two.

"A little less bold" is how RIM's co-CEO has described the latest incarnation of its Bold smartphone (pictured above).

The BlackBerry Bold 9700 was unveiled today and has something of a European flavour too - being the first device from RIM entirely designed in its R&D facility in Bochum, Germany.

Unified communications (UC) implementations bring together a variety of digital communication tools to make it easier for users to collaborate and improve business processes.

For example it might mean bringing together instant messaging, presence information, video conferencing, as well as email, SMS, fax and voicemail to improve productivity, and potentially trim the cost of an organisations' IT infrastructure.

Getting chewed - and eaten - by dogs. Getting run over by cars. And Land Rovers.

It's not an easy life being a police BlackBerry out on the mean streets.

Apple has announced it's sold a record number of iPhones in the fourth fiscal quarter of this year, announcing the quarter as its "most profitable ever".

The company shifted 7.4 million iPhones - a seven per cent increase year-on-year. Macs are also doing well, Apple said it's sold 3.05 million Macs, 17 per cent more than a year ago.

This week saw hardware maker Acer announcing the latest additions to its laptop and smartphone ranges.

One of the devices to debut was this dual-boot version of its Acer Aspire One D250 netbook (pictured above in white).

RIM today announced the launch of the BlackBerry Storm2 smartphone, the company's second touchscreen handset.

The device is the successor to the original Storm, launched last year and, like its predecessor, the Storm2 is exclusive to the Vodafone network in the UK.

BlackBerry-maker RIM has unveiled its second touchscreen device, the Storm2.

The Storm2, announced in May this year, will be released exclusively on Vodafone's network on a £35 per month contract and will be available from 26 October, with the operator already taking pre-orders.

CIOs spend hours listening to suppliers pitch their latest technology. How would these vendors fare with just one minute to get their message across?

silicon.com turns up the heat and gives vendors only 60 seconds to impress a panel of CIOs with their products. The IT chiefs then quiz the supplier before delivering their verdict on the technology in the form of a red or green light.

Phones 4u has confirmed it will start selling Apple's iPhone this year.

The retailer announced yesterday it will begin selling the iPhone before Christmas in stores across the UK and via its website.

ICT workers looking for a new job should keep their eye on the telecoms sector.

The number of job vacancies in the industry rose sharply last month, according to new research.

There may be some good news for Sidekick owners: users' data which was thought lost after a server failure at Microsoft subsidiary Danger - the company that makes the devices - may yet be retrieved.

Users of T-Mobile's Sidekick had been told the lost data - which included contacts, calendars and other information - may be gone for good after the server outage last week, but T-Mobile said last night "prospects of recovering some lost content may now be possible".

Smartphones have come a long way in the last few years. Not so long ago, a smartphone all too often meant a cumbersome PDA-style brick running an equally cumbersome operating system, or else a Qwerty-sporting BlackBerry tucked discretely inside a businessperson's briefcase.

How times have changed.

Companies should create their own "technology watch lists" so they know when cutting-edge technology is ready for widespread adoption - and also to keep the CIO from being ambushed by other execs.

Research company Forrester said enterprise architects (EA) should build a list of technologies to watch, for CIOs to use to educate business peers and influence their strategy. Such a list should also ensure the CIO won't be caught out by other execs clutching case studies of the successful implementation of new technology at other companies.

Amazon is preparing to launch its Kindle e-book reader in more than 100 countries worldwide, including the UK. This is the first time the device has been available outside of the US, where it launched in November 2007.

Photo credit: Amazon.com

The Amazon Kindle then - is that one of those book readers?That's exactly what it is. e-book readers are typically small, thin devices - about the size of a paperback novel - that can store hundreds or thousands of books in digital form. The text is displayed on the device's screen, with readers able to flip virtual pages with the touch of a button.

The Kindle's been around for a while, hasn't it…About two years to be exact - the first Kindle was launched in November 2007.

Amazon is moving into the world of mobile payments with the launch of a new service that will allow consumers to buy goods, services and mobile apps using the payment information stored on their Amazon accounts.

The retailer has made APIs available for the service, called Amazon Mobile Payments Service, which will allow other merchants and mobile app companies to offer their users the ability to make purchases without the need to set up a separate payment account.

Amazon's Kindle is coming to the UK.

On Tuesday, the web retail giant announced that its e-book reader, previously only available in the US, will now be available in more than 100 countries.

Microsoft has announced the first devices to bear the Windows Phone brand are ready to hit the market.

The Windows Phone brand covers handsets running on Windows Mobile 6.5, and is a shift away from the current Windows Mobile marketing. The first Windows Phones come from HTC, LG and Samsung, with Sony Ericsson launching a handset on 30 October.

Once again, September saw another fresh crop of students head off to university for the first time, on their way to becoming the next generation of IT workers.

But how good are the UK's universities at turning out the skilled professionals that the tech industry needs? According to a silicon.com CIO Jury last month, the answer is not very. Asked if tech graduates are finishing university with the expertise their companies are looking for, only four out of 12 said yes.

The winner of the Fujitsu Mobile Phone Design Award 2009 was announced this week at the IT and electronics trade show Ceatec Japan, where finalist designs are on display.

Here is the Tile, designed by Wataru Igarashi. The description states: "Screens have to be flat - the goal of this design was to break convention and create a distinctive design allowing user-friendliness previously unheard of."

Flash is ubiquitous on the desktop - now Adobe is hoping it can repeat the trick with mobiles.

The company has just announced Flash Player 10.1 which will let users view Flash video and play Flash games on smartphones, netbooks and other mobile hardware.

Bonhams previewed some vintage tech last month as the London auctioneer prepared to put a selection of classic hardware under the hammer.

The sale includes Sinclair computers such as the ZX81 machine and a ZX Spectrum 48K extension shown here.

O2 is set to start testing LTE (the long-term evolution of the 3G mobile standard) technology in the UK "within the next six months".

The trials of the technology are the first to be carried out by any UK operator. T-Mobile and Orange have said they intend to roll out such networks in the future, however.