Forget today's synthetic sound systems - if you want to give your digital tracks the audiophile treatment, you need to take a look at the Fatman iTube.

Yes, it's an old-fashioned valve amp for your portable player, which promises to give the music from your iPod "a luscious warm analogue sound". While old-school technology might be at work for the music output, the iTube is still a very modern piece of kit. It's essentially a docking station for all iPods (except the shuffle), which comes with a remote control so you can sit back and enjoy the music - or if you hook it up to the TV, you can enjoy your pictures and video clips, again controlled by the remote.

Will it really improve your music that much? You can find out in July, when it goes on sale for £300.

Fatman website

More for your iPod:
Pimpyaplayer - pimp up your 'Pod to the max!
Logic3 i-Station8 for iPod

Pure has updated its first PocketDAB player, introducing the Pure PocketDAB 1500, which now features FM with RDS, a new colour scheme and a rechargeable battery pack - but still manages to be Pure's lightest portable to date.

Packed into a black anodised aluminium case, the PocketDAB 1500 features both DAB and FM with RDS, with 10 presets for each. There's also an easily readable orange backlit LCD with two line display, as well as graphical icons for volume, battery life, clock, DAB, FM, Stereo, EQ and signal strength. The PocketDAB 1500's textSCAN feature lets you pause and control the scrolling text, so you can note down web addresses or song titles.

Gear 4 have a plethora of iPod accessories, turning your humble MP3 player into a pimped up, all-singing, all dancing music system that will play practically anywhere.

With their CruiseControl, you can control your iPod from up to 50 metres, including through walls, using the remote control. By attaching a receiver to the dock, the remote will use RF to communicate, enabling you to play, skip, shuffle and repeat, as well as control the volume. In theory.

However, in practice there are immediate issues with their claims that you can stray 50 metres from the iPod. Within 10 metres the review device stopped working, and putting a wall between the remote and the player decreased this still further.

On the plus side, it couldn't be simpler to use. The dock is powered by the iPod and is immediately recognised, shown by a green LED on the front. It also comes with a lanyard, so you can hang the remote round your neck, and a strap to attach it to bike handlebars or a steering wheel.

Remember ROK? They've been providing TV to GPRS/EDGE mobiles for months now. Probably the main thing that's held them back is the number of compatible phones with the service. Recently, this was improved when the service became available to a number of Sony phones, including the W800i, but now it's been boosted further with the news that 12 Microsoft compatible devices have been added to the list, bringing the total number of handsets up to 37. You can check the full handset list here.

What this means is that the chances of your handset being good to use the service have considerably increased, with the total far in excess of the five handsets that can view, for example, Orange 3G TV in the UK. If your phone is now compatible, you'll also need to be connected via O2 contract, Vodafone, T-Mobile or Orange. The service isn't available through 3 or Virgin.

Vonage is trying to revolutionise phones and VoIP with its unique service which will take over the role of you landline in your house. Even though you don't need to have a PC switched on to use it, it still offers you the same low cost calls as ordinary VoIP services. If you have a wireless router, you can choose to go for Vonage's cordless Wi-Fi handset, the UTStarcom F1000B which will let you make and receive calls from an ordinary landline number, but from anywhere you happen to have Wi-Fi access - home, the office, the office in New York, wherever.

The guys over at GadgetCentre have been trying one out recently and, while there were a couple of hiccups in the service, the overall impression was pretty positive. Vonage has really come up with a decent way of saving a few quid on your phone calls and would be an especially favourable alternative if you're thinking of putting a second phone line in your house. Read the full review here.

  Two new DVD/HDD recorders from Hitachi hit the shelves in the coming weeks - the Memory Master DV-DS163E (with 160GB hard drive) and the DV-DS253E (with 250GB hard drive).

Housed in a smart black and brushed platimum casing, Hitachi are selling these on the basis of ease of use and their wider use as a multimedia machine - it can also save MP3 and photo files, as well as video. Featuring a simple menu interface to help navigate through all files, you can turn your TV into a high quality multimedia 'jukebox'.

Why would you need a pair of binoculars in space? Unless someone in the props department took the word "ship" too literally or the crew beamed down for a spot of alien spotting, I can't think of a valid reason why Star Trek binoculars should exist. But they do - and they're for sale, spotted by those ever-watchful folk over at Bayraider.

They're not from the original Star Trek, but from series six of latter-day offshoot Deep Space 9 and are being sold by sold by Jolie, who claims to be a "starving writer/photographer/proofreader/editor/personal assistant" who's living in LA, but can't afford to buy food. She can afford an internet connection though and is offering them for a starting bid of $1,500.

Fancy them? Find out more about these and the best of the rest of eBay's quirkiest auctions over at Bayraider.

We covered the Skull Candy Proletariat NC 635 noise cancelling headphones yesterday, which are certainly worth considering if you want to keep outside noise to a minimum. But if you're on a budget and don't want the added functionality of the Proletariat unit, the Fatman FatFones might be for you.

The Fatman FatFones use technology first developed by audiologists for the in-ear monitoring of musicians and Formula One drivers. The earpieces are designed to fit your ears anatomically correctly - this means that they effectively block out background noise such as planes, trains and traffic, delivering the sound closer to your eardrum. What does all this mean? You get a clear sound without outside distraction and at lower volumes - which reduces the risk of damaged hearing.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em - that seems to be the idea behind Acer's first all-white notebook, the rather MacBook-like TravelMate 3020. According to the company, it's a colour scheme that conveys "images of pureness, cleanliness and maximum lightness".

The 3020 features a 12.1-inch, 1,280 x 800 widescreen display, powered by the Intel-made integrated chipset GMA 950 graphics core and your choice from a a range of Core Duo processors. There's also 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0, along with an integrated 1.3mp webcam.

It's not just the "cool" stuff we downlaod from the net - a new survey has found that we also take advantage of music downloads to purchase the song we're too ashamed of buying in the shops.

Yes, while acts like the Arctic Monkeys and Sandi Thom make the internet headlines, we're apparently all busy downloading Peter Crouch's favourite turn, Chesney Hawkes and his "One And Only" hit, according to the Music Choice European Music Census.

Music Choice Marketing Director Simon George said: "All music fans, even the  most ardent rockers, have a favourite track they're embarrassed to admit to.  In fact, our research shows 1 in 4 of us are ashamed of part of our music  collection. Guilty pleasures are a growing phenomenon with clubs dedicating entire nights to sing-along cheesy tracks and as downloading becomes a  mainstream method of music purchase more of us can get our hands on the  tracks we don't want seen on our CD rack."

Read on after the turn for a list of the top British and European guilty pleasures.

Here's something to think about, where do old Internet pages go? Mostly they disappear forever, into the ether, never to be seen again but some of them are being saved for posterity in the Wayback Machine Internet Archive; who knows, maybe even Propellerhead will turn up in there one day? More than 55 billion pages have been stored, the earliest of them dating back to 1966 and all you have to do to browse the archive is tap in the web address, or use the search engine to locate pages by date or name match.  This ebay home page dates back to 1999, when life was obviously a lot simpler...

As they say, it does what it says on the tin and the whole point of onebillionvisits.com is to clock up a billion hits and return the counter to zero. One billion visitors represents around one sixth of the world's population, makes you think, so who will be the billionth visitor? In case you give a damn it could be you; just sign up with the site and they'll send you an email alert so you can join in the fun. Mind you, it could take a while, the counter only reduced by 2 during the five minutes we spent looking at the site and at that rate, unless my back of a fag packet calculations are incorrect it's going to take something like 4,700 years... It's now up to you to speed things up a bit and put them out of their moisery

Not content with dominating your PC, Google wants a bigger role on your mobile phone. The company has announced the availability of free mobile services, accessible through your phone's web browser.

From today, Google account holders can use their Gmail mail account, browse recent Google news stories and access their Google home page from a mobile phone. To access Gmail, go to the Gmail homepage  through your phone's web browser and sign in to your Gmail account. Gmail will then optimise the interface for each phone. As well as browsing messages, you can also view attached photos and documents from your phone, and reply by call to people whose phone number is stored in their Gmail account. Gmail messages are automatically synchronised, regardless of whether Gmail is accessed from a mobile device or through the web.

Just bought yourself a snazzy new Walkman phone? Want to make your music a bit less personal? Well then you'll want to look at the smart line-up of speaker sets Sony Ericsson is peddling which are compatible with a large number of its handsets including our favourites the W810i and K750i.

But before you splash out up to £175 on one of these, you should check out GadgetCentre's review of both the MPS-60 and MDS-70. For anyone feeling flush, the MDS-70 produces some beautiful sound and will helpfully charge your handset. It's a bit of bulky beast though. For those on a tighter budget, the MPS-60 offers a surprising level of audio quality for pocket-sized set. Read the full review here.

In the words of TRENDnet's website "Networking is the future!" (No, I didn't add that exclamation mark). They're all about 'embracing' and 'bridging gaps' apparently. And with such passion, it's no surprise they've got a Skype phone kit in their product range.

The ClearSky Bluetooth VoiP phone enables you to disconnect the handset from the USB cable it uses for charging and wander around to your hearts content. The press release claims you should be able to take calls in your car, but with a range of 100m you'd have to be sitting in your driveway... or your neighbor's driveway at a stretch. Still, you can safely wander around a distinctly average sized house without losing any of the sound quality.

The Bluetooth capability moves Skype forward another leap, freeing the caller from the computer, and making it more feasible as a main family phone. This particular dongle is also compatible with most other Bluetooth devices, such as printers, PDAs and cameras, so will be a useful addition to any computer.

It's been criticised by some as being difficult to set-up, but in this case, worked perfectly from the word go. There was instant recognition of both the Bluetooth dongle and the handset by my computer, which historically, has trouble recognising a new mouse. Impressive stuff.

Rushed out to get your brand new white Nintendo DS Lite? Well, we've got news for you - it's already getting the makeover treatment - this time in pink.

Yes, Nintendo has decided to produce a "Noble Pink" DS Lite, which will hit the stores in Japan on July 20th. Apart from changing the colour to pitch it, you would assume, at the female market, the actual console is exactly the same as the one released last week in the UK.

The price in Japan is the same as a standard DS Lite. There's no news of release dates outside Japan as yet, but you'd imagine it being a candidate for this year's Christmas stocking.

Nintendo website

Via Engadget

More Nintendo:
DS Lite makes its UK debut
Nintendo Wii gets Opera web browser

D-Link has unveiled the Securicam DCS-2120 wireless internet camera, which allows you to remotely view live video and listen to sound to a 3G mobile phone or PDA. 

Complete with CPU and web server, the DCS-2120 camera also features a low light sensitive lens ideal for night-time use, 4x digital zoom capability and a built-in 802.11.g wireless network interface. It also comes with surveillance management software that can control up to sixteen cameras viewable from a single screen. A snapshot facility means that images can be captured directly from a web browser to a computer hard drive without installing any additional software.

In addition, motion detection triggered recording and scheduled recording means that images are only recorded to a computer hard drive when motion is detected or a recording has been pre-scheduled, saving disk space and eliminates the time wasted viewing unnecessary images.

The DCS-2120 will be available from July 2006, with a price of around £180.

D-Link website

More security:
LInksys internet security camera
GuardRobo security robot

inRemember we told you about Sony's UX micro PC last month? Well, the company has announced a slightly amended version of the Vaio UX, which drops the hard drive in favour of a flash storage unit.

What does it mean? Well, they're certainly lighter, but with less capacity unfortunately, a drop to 16GB from 30GB. Apart from that, the specification is much the same - 512MB of 400MHz DDR SDRAM; a choice of 1.2GHz Core Solo U1400, 1.06GHz Core Solo U1300 or 1.06GHz Celeron M 423 processor; 802.11a/b/g/ Wi-Fi; Bluetooth 2.0; 4.5in, 1,204 x 600 display and Intel 945GMS integrated chipset. It's available in either Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Pro versions.

How well is your security software protecting you? Usually the only time you'll find out is when it detects an attack, or afterwards, when something nasty has got through and infected your PC. According to Propellerhead a group of researchers called Intelguardians decided to put anti spyware tools to the test by designing a series of small and benign programs that attempt to probe a PCs defences. Each of the 20 or Spycar checks has to be carried out manually, by downloading a small file and clicking OK, at which point the program tries to install a Registry key, a piece of code, or change a setting.

If you are trying to coax a dead or dying PC back to life then it's probably not much comfort to learn that according to Gartner Research computers are becoming more reliable. The Annual Failure Rates (AFRs) reported by leading manufacturers have fallen by 25 percent in the last two years, and believe it or not, laptops are almost twice as unreliable as desktop PCs.