Berlin: Is today the day the consumer electronics industry's fightback against Apple begins? Most of the big names from the gadget world are in Berlin for the IFA consumer electronics show which is now becoming one of the best events to see new products launched. Apple of course is not here - but lo and behold, on the eve of IFA it held its own big show, where the highlights were further moves into the worlds of digital music and TV, and its very own little social network, ...

How much does the audio quality of your mobile phone calls matter to you? Not much if you are to believe the mobile industry. After all over the last 20 years the operators and the manufacturers have spent billions of pounds upgrading their networks and perfecting their handsets. But while everything else about the mobile experience has been transformed, there has been no real improvement in the quality of our audio calls. But now Orange is betting that call quality does matter to a significant number of consumers. It has become the first operator to launch HD voice, which promises the biggest improvement in ...

Heard any good sounds lately, something that you might like preserved for posterity? Perhaps nursery rhymes chanted in a playground, the roar of the crowd at a Premiership football match - or something as simple as the waves crashing on a beach? Well now you have the chance to contribute to an archive of sounds gathered across the country. The increasingly innovative British Library has got together with one of Britain's most interesting technology start up firms to create an interactive sound map of the UK. The library is inviting anyone to use Audioboo, a smartphone application, to record sounds, and upload ...

BT's claims in some adverts about the speed of its 20Mbit/s broadband service are misleading - that was the conclusion of an Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) adjudication published today. When I first saw the story I concluded that the ASA had finally decided that advertising of "up to 20Mbit/s" or "up to" anything was just too dubious to continue. But no - in a way the ASA's ruling was even more startling. It has decided that BT, after spending a fortune building out its faster 21CN network, has not provided the evidence to show that customers were going to enjoy faster speeds. Here's the key sentence: "Because we had not ...

Has the apps goldrush moved on from Apple to Android? A year ago stories abounded of bedroom developers making their fortune by developing applications for the iPhone App Store but now it looks as though Google's Android Market may be proving a more attractive and lucrative platform for some. We know that Android, at least in the United States, has overtaken the iPhone in terms of handset sales - not surprising when there are now dozens of devices, whereas Apple has just one. At first there were far fewer apps for Android and nearly all were free, but a blog post from one ...