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We generally don’t associate The Sun with subtle wit, but their viral ad released as part of their 40th anniversary celebrations really is a rather good affair.

Claiming the newspaper to be ‘the original handheld device,’ the cheeky viral created by Glue London spoofs the iconic Apple iPhone ads, with a copy of The Sun being handled in much the same way as an iPhone, backed by a similar jaunty piano soundtrack and assured voice-over.

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Amazon.com has announced that their Kindle eBook reader has notched up huge sales over November and is now, “the most wished for, the most gifted, and the #1 bestselling product across all product categories” in their US online store.

Despite competition growing fiercely in the eBook market, Amazon’s revolutionary portable reader remains the one to beat, and is proof indeed that eBook readers really have arrived.

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Nixon have added some new colours to their range of Nomadic headphones, with the colour schemes suggesting that the designer might have imbibed high quality hallucinogenics before heading for the drawing board.

The white and black combo isn’t too bad (although white ear pads and and a white band are sure to get dirty pretty sharpish), but things take a turn for the worse with the lurid lime green number and then there’s the visual onslaught of the red and gold bling pair.

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For Blackberry fans feeling a little fed up with the current colour options of black, black or black, then there’s good news a-stirring in Japan, where  RIM (Research In Motion) are about to roll out a ‘BlackBerry Bold’ smartphone in a natty shade of white.

Perfect for anyone rocking a Marty Hopkirk look, the none-more-white handset will be released to the Japan market via NTT DoCoMo, and made available on December 3rd in time for an extra white Christmas.

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According to a recent study by Strategy Analytics, the majority of  iPhone users want their next phone to have a proper hardware QWERTY keyboard.

Their findings were based on a study of  nearly 2500 iPhone users, more than half of which said they’d be interested in owning a phone with both a touchscreen and a physical QWERTY keyboard.

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It hasn’t made it to the UK yet, but Palm’s low cost Pixi smartphone has been on sale in the States for a few weeks now and we’ve been keeping an eye out for reviews as they come in.

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Looking like they should be orbiting some distant planet are the new Klipsch ProMedia Ultra 2.0 desktop speakers.

Sporting an industrial, sci-fi design more likely to appeal to Billy Bloke and his gang of geezers, each magnetically-shielded satellite speaker hosts dual 2.5in fibre-composite cone drivers and a 1in metallised polymer tweeter, powered by a 15w power amplifier.

A suitably space age-sounding MicroTractrix Horn is coupled to the tweeter to boost clarity and power efficiency, while the ‘long-throw woofer units’ whizz along on neodymium motor structures, whatever they are.

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Looking like they mean business in their sparkly piano black finish and rounded corners, the Creative Gigaworks T40 Series II speaker system is aimed at music lovers and multimedia fans who don’t mind splashing out a bit of dosh for a decent sound.

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Geardiary have got their hands on an early iPhone version of the voice to text transcription software, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and they seem more than chuffed with its capabilities.

How well can it convert voice to text? Well, according to GearDiary, it’s the bees knees:

I’m telling you I cannot believe how accurate this is. The transcription usually requires very little, if any editing, at all before I am able to send it. It continually blows my mind.

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Asus has slipped out the Eee Box 1501 nettop, a mere slip of a thing for slapping on your desktop, living room shelves or kitchen.

Nettops are designed to arouse the pockets of folks looking for a cheap  secondary machine or a basic media centre, and juggle low cost netbook components with relatively low processing power to produce small, stylish computer for less demanding uses.

Clearly not for hard core Photoshop aficionados then, the Asus Eee Box 1501 comes with a dedicated Nvidia ION graphics chip (which is more powerful than yer average netttop’s integrated graphics) and an optical drive for DVD playback with  full 1080p output from an HDMI-out port.

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Ricoh’s GR range of compact, high-end street shooting cameras is now up to version III, but we fell in love with the camera back in 2006 when the first model came out.

We reviewed the camera not long after it was released, but seeing as we’re still using it, we thought you may be interested in both the original review and our long term opinion after three eyars with the camera.

Many of the comments equally apply to the GRD III, which shares a lot of features with the original camera, although several key areas have been much improved.

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Ricoh has whisked out a firmware update for its high end ‘street shooting’ GR Digital III digital compact.

A lovely – if pricey -  little camera, the GR Digital comes with a fixed, wide angle 28mm (equiv)  f1.7 lens, set in a rugged, pocketable package that offers a host of manual controls for the ‘hands on’ photographer.

The latest firmware update serves up additional features and improvements,  including compatibility with the GF-1 external flashgun, the  addition of 1.5m snap focus distance and improved playback functions.

The firmware will be available for download from December 1, 2009 from Ricoh’s website.

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Mozilla Thunderbird, the free email client produced by the makers of the Firefox browser, has recently undergone some important revisions, and is now available as Thunderbird 3.0 RC1.

RC stands for Release Candidate, meaning that this version of Thunderbird 3 is designed for testing, and might still have a few bugs, so don’t install it in production environments.

I’ve been using Thunderbird 3 in its various Beta iterations for a while, and have now updated to RC1, and I believe that this latest version of the popular email client is a considerable improvement over its predecessors.

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Moderately amusing and perhaps worth a few moments of your time is this music video documenting a doomed love affair based on the couple’s choice of dSLR.

Here’s the chorus to give you an idea of what you’re in for:

Cause I’m a Canon gangsta and your a Nikon shawtay
I wanna take a picture of that rockin bootay

We couldn’t keep the act up we just had to face the facts
but hey look on the bright side at least we’re not a Pentax

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We raved and we frothed over Panasonic’s Lumix DMC-GF1 camera, before eventually caving in and buying a GF1/20mm f1.7 lens recently, so it’s good to see firmware updates coming through.

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