Michael Robertson, one of Silicon Valley’s most prolific company creators, continues to plug along with so-called music lockers. His most recent music company, MP3tunes, began offering the lockers for free last week in an apparent attempt to draw interest from consumers. Music lockers enable a customer to store music on a company’s servers and later …

Philips is pleased with itself. It’s been ten years since it displayed the first prototype 42-inch gas plasma TV, which was just 100mm thick so could be “hung on the wall like a painting”. At last, say our Dutch friends, the TV has been liberated from the corner of the room. Reality was never Philips’ strong point. It seems to …

Music on the Internet has often been free or legal, but start-up SpiralFrog is looking to offer songs that are both. The 20-person New York-based company has signed a deal with record label Universal Music Group to offer songs for free, hoping to make money by showing ads to users as they download the music. “Essentially they are paying with …

It’s not quite the Oscars — so fewer flashing bulbs, designer dresses and gushing speeches, perhaps — but the annual EISA Awards are highly regarded in the electronics industry. LG has affirmed its rising status this year by scooping three top gongs. EISA is the largest editorial multimedia organisation in Europe with a membership of 54 audio, video, mobile and …

With the arrival of HDTV, Blu-ray, HD DVD, the XBox 360, the PS3 and so on, I am running out of connections at the back of my TV. What do you recommend — an HDMI or component switching box, or is there a better way to connect all these devices? Is there a particular product I should look out for (especially …

Toshiba has added more flesh to the bones of its Regza LCD television range, which we first got a sniff of back in April. The WLT68 range features a whopping three HDMI inputs (two at the back and one on the side) — so you can flick between Sky HD, PlayStation 3 and a Blu-ray or HD DVD player. New …

There’s good news coming for digital telly fans who’ve resisted the temptations of Sky and cable. Freeview Playback — a new standard for hard disk personal video recorders — will be here by the autumn. It will let viewers record an entire TV series at the touch of a single button, will work with programmes that are late or run …

Reality TV addicts will be aware of a daily dilemma presenting itself at around 10pm every night. Do you watch Pete and Nikki’s blossoming relationship on Channel 4’s Big Brother or take guilty pleasure in seeing Sophie Anderton nearing a nervous breakdown in ITV’s Celebrity Love Island? If you want to watch both you’ll need access to a time-travelling machine …

The EMI Group record label has licensed its music catalog of more than 1,000 artists to Qtrax, a legal peer-to-peer network owned by Brilliant Technologies. Qtrax, which has yet to be released, also has licensing agreements with several other music corporations, such as BMI and the Association of Independent Music. Legal P2P networks have become more commonplace in the wake …

Let’s take a quick head count of high-definition devices that rely on HDMI inputs. There are Sky’s HDTV receivers, high-def DVD players and even games consoles like the upcoming PlayStation 3. So, why are so many new screens still arriving with only one HDMI input? It must be a lonely life being an HDMI input — you’re stuck on your …