Don't normally get too excited about new speakers, but these curvaceous numbers look very nice and they're from a respected British company too. Called the Mordaunt Short Genie , the home cinema package comprises four magnetically shielded satellites and a centre speaker plus a 200 Watt subwoofer.

Each Genie houses a 10cm mid/bass driver and the cabinets, which are available in silver and black, are made from a die cast alloy for maximum rigidity. The Genie costs £800. For more info go to Mordaunt Short

When David Beckham lifts the Euro 2004 trophy in Portugal in July England will witness the best party since, oohh, the Rugby World Cup final However not everyone will be wrapping themselves in the flag of St Georges and cracking open bottles of Newky Brown. For in addition to the few sourpuss Celts who automatically root for anyone England plays against, there could be a few glum faces at JVC and Comet too.

For the retailer is promising that should England life the trophy (current odds are about 7-1) it will give anyone who has bought a JVC camcorder their money back.

Can't decide whether this is a nice touch or they are being rather unpatriotic in expecting England not to win the competition.

We recently got the chance to play with the Samsung Z105, which is being groomed by Vodafone to feature as its launch phone for its consumer 3G service that's expected to be announced at the start of May.

Overall we were impressed by some aspects of the phone but a little cool on others.

The good stuff

Size - Well the clamshell phone is about average for 3G phones. It is roughly the same size as the NEC e616 (available via Three) and slightly larger than LG's upcoming U8100.

Design - It is very simple to use. The buttons are kind of half Samsung and half Vodafone (the lay out is a little reminiscent of Voda's Sharp phones). The interface is fairly simple to use and access to Vodafone Live! service is a one-button press.

Battery - At 240 minutes talktime and 110 standby time, it is good for a 3G mobile.

Video Calling - This is the phone's strong point in that it sports an excellent 256k colour screen, which delivers top quality moving images. It does seem a bit bizarre though that Vodafone appears to be majoring on person-to-person video calling when it has been a comparative flop for Three.

Alternative energy company Freeplay, famous for those wind-up radios, is to enter the DAB market - reports this week's ERT.

Rory Stear, the company's chairman and chief exec told ERT that while design hasn't been decideded upon, product development is racing ahead with a launch hopefully before Christmas. "Obviously we can't ignore the DAB market, as it has become the way of the world in the UK market." Production of AM/FM radios (such as the one pictured) will be unaffected.

Stear insists that the DAB radio would add 'Freeplay value' with "alternative power sources, including solar, kinetic and windpower, paramount." Also promised are two new torches, Sherpa Xray and Sierra.

Bought yourself an Apple iPod but not sure where to put it when you go out? Well we reckon the Felicidade Groove Bag Triplet might be the holdall you've been waiting for.

Not only has the bag been designed with a special pouch to keep your music player in, the white bag also sports a pair of speakers to enable owners to inflict their music on unsuspecting passers-by. Available with a choice of handles, the bags are on sale via www.shop21.uk.com for £104.58.

If you prefer something more fashionable than utilitarian Italian design house Gucci also has a dedicated iPod bag. Featuring a beige and ebony patterned design it is available for $195 from www.gucci.com .

What with Euro 2004 less than two months away we are already starting to assemble a range of gadgets to ensure that we don't miss a kick.

We quite like the look of the Lifeview TV Walker, a mobile phone sized TV tuner that connects to a laptop via a USB 2.0 connector.

The device, which is distributed in the UK by ECS, in theory covers all three worldwide TV standards so it will work in the US as well as European countries.

Also on board is an MPEG encoder that supports MPEG 1,2,and 4 recording and the tuner comes with PVR software-enabling users to save programmes on their laptop's hard disk. It is available now for £65 + VAT. One is coming through the post any day now so we'll have a full review shortly.

It appears that the successor to the Handspring Treo 600 Palm based smartphone, which is sold in the UK by Orange, is on the cards reports The Guardian.

A slip by US bank in a communication to its investors confirmed rumours that have been across the web for months that the Handspring Treo 610 does exist and is likely to launch in late summer.

The device will keep the form factor of its predecessor including its mini thumbpad, but will sport a higher resolution screen, boast more memory and offer Bluetooth connectivity. Some reports suggest that the 610 will also jettison the 600's integrated VGA camera.

We have always rated the Toshiba Gigabeat G20 MP3 player. The hard disk based 20 Gigabyte player is one of the few that can challenge the Apple iPod in terms of design, and it has a bit of a USP in that it is so thin.

So we are pleased to see the arrival of a Gigabeat G21 in Japan this month. Only this time round Toshiba is supplying the player with a Wi-Fi equipped wireless cradle.

For a few months now we have been wondering why Samsung has a range of impressive GSM smartphones on sale in the US, but not in the UK. Well we need wonder no more as it appears that the two models, the i500 and i700, will reach the UK in the next few months.

The intriguing thing is that they will be launched at roughly the same time as another new Samsung handset, the D710. This puts Samsung in the unique position of offering a trio of smartphones that all use different operating systems, namely MS Windows Mobile, Palm and Symbian.

We could spend hours debating whether there's a future for the low-end PDA. After all aren't we all going to be using smartphones?

That said we kind of like the look of the latest £200-ish Zire 72 multimedia style PDA from PalmOne.

It looks cool - it is finished in a funky blue. It has a 1.2 mega pixel camera, MP3 player, Bluetooth and of course Palm One's wonderfully easy to use 5.2.8 operating system. The 65k 320x320 pixel screen looks pretty good too and the processor (its is an Intel 312 Mhz ARM) seems pretty whizzy.

Not sure we'd swap it for a Treo or an XDA 2 though.

We'll have a review for you next week. In the meantime here's what Forbes had to say about it.

There's very good news for anyone in the UK who gets their broadband via cable. Both the major cable providers, Telewest and NTL, have announced that they will up the data speeds of current subscribers from May for no extra cost to the user.

Telewest's option is especially good news for serious online gamers, videoaholics and those with wireless home networks as it is now upping the speed of its top rate service from 2mbps (which currently costs £50 a month) to 3mbps. Those on the 1mpbs (£35 per month) service now get 1.5mbps and those who opt for the standard 512kbps (£25 per month) are upped an extra 250kbps to 750 kbps. Telewest's 256kbps offering, which retails for £17.99, remains unaffected.

With NTL the major surgery is at the low-end where for £17.99 per month it is offering a 300kbps service. The 750kbps offering (up from 512) retails for £25 while the new 1.5mbps service is £38.

Got yourself an iPod mini yet? Chances are probably not, unless of course you live in the USA and were quick off the mark when they went on sale in late Feb.

The rest of us are waiting for the worldwide launch which is pencilled in for July. There are however some folk who want a music player to take on their hols and can't wait until then.

So for them The Guardian has a round up of the best of the rest of MP3 players you can actually buy now. They include direct rivals like the 1.5Gig Philips HDD060 and 4Gig Creative MuVo2 as well as recently launched devices like the Cowon iAudio M3.

Over in Japan Yamaha in collaboration with Nipro Corp and researchers at Toyama has developed a gadget that can tell how stressed you are by analysing, wait for it, your spit.

According to a news report on I4U it works by measuring amylase which is a digestive enzyme found in saliva. Apparently the more stressed you are the more amylase is present.

The company hopes to have a gadget available for both institutions and the Japanese public later in the year.

The team at Peripheral Corner have been a busy lot lately. Not only have they introduced the Eten smartphones to the UK (click here for more), they have also just unveiled a hard disk based video player.

The not very originally named MPEG4 Portable Video Player actually looks remarkably like a gadget we saw at CES being touted by a Chinese company we'd never heard of.

However the player has a reasonably good line up of features including a 20 Gigabyte hard disk, real time recording and playback of MPEG 4 files (mîcrosoft's Portable Media Centers aren't compatible with this format in spite of the fact that it is the most used compressed video system), a 3.5inch LCD screen and MP3 playback. There's also a built in mîcrophone and the player can moonlight as a hard disk too.

In the middle of last year Sony unveiled the first of its super high-end, and it should be added, rather expensive Qualia series of products.

Now it is to add a MiniDisc player to the range.

The Qualia 017 might look silvery but the material of the body is brass and it is coated with palladium, which is used for coating luxury watches and fountain pens. Apparently it is such a tricky process that Sony can only make around 15 a month, which makes the asking price of around £1200 ($1700) look a real bargain.

Accompanying the MD player is Qualia 010 a pair of hi-fi headphones with the price tag of £1700 ($2400).

See more here.

Cowon, which earlier this week launched its hard disk based iPod rival, the iAudio 3 through MP3-plus.net is also bringing a small flash memory-based music player, the iAudio 4, to the UK.

Available with storage capacities ranging from 128MB (around £120) to 512MB (around £220), the iAudio 4's unique feature is a large screen with a backlight that displays up to 124 different colours.

Compatible with MP3, Windows Media Audio (WMA) and WAV (CD quality) formats, the iAudio 3 also boasts an FM radio tuner and an integrated voice recorder. It offers up to 15 hours worth of music playback via an AAA battery. The player also comes with a neck strap, carry case and JetAudio 4 audio and video software for the PC.

More from here

We were huge fans of the Linksys B Media Adapter, a device launched last year that enabled us to wirelessly stream music from our PC to the hi-fi while watching images from our computer on the TV.

Good to see that Linksys is back with a new product that sounds even better. The device does pretty much the same as its predecessor, but also adds access to Internet radio stations to the mix.

Here's yet another mîcrosoft Windows Mobile 2003 smartphone we haven't seen before, yet curiously this one sports a rather familiar design.

Retailing for £500 without a contract the AnexTEK SP230 features a flip up/down keypad, which we reckon could well have been inspired by the Sony Ericsson P800/900.

According to the UK distributor Sword Services, the handset which boasts a 320x240 pixel screen with 65K colours, a 400Mhz Intel PXA22 processor and 64MB ROM and 64MB RAM is pitched up against current champ MS phone O2's XDA 2.

Sadly we don't have any photographic evidence as cameras are banned from the Hong Kong Electrical Fair, but OEM maker Shuoying International is promising a camcorder that could really shake the market up when it is launched later this year.

The model is a traditional camcorder storing moving images on miniDV cassettes, however it has two killer features. Firstly it has a whopping five-mega pixel CCD for capturing still images. Secondly it has built in Wi-Fi to enable it to stream video direct from the camcorder to a PC.

We'll believe it when we see it, but it sounds like a really cool product.

So far the race to build the world's largest plasma screen has been the sole preserve of Korean giants Samsung and LG.

Now a Chinese company Skyworth is claiming to have caught them both napping and taken the title with an 84inch screen. As far as we can remember Samsung was in the lead with its 80inch screen.

The centrepiece of its stands at the Hong Kong Electrical fair the screen is likely to arrive in Europe later in the year wearing the badge of another manufacturer.

At the show the company hired no fewer than 12 stands to display a range of over 200 LCD, plasma and CRT screens.

If your Chinese is good pay a visit here.