What's wrong with the iPhone, from a Japanese perspective? Almost everything: the high monthly data plans that go with it, its paucity of features, the low-quality camera, the unfashionable design and the fact that it's not Japanese.

The country is famous for being ahead of its time when it comes to technology, and the iPhone just doesn't cut it. For example, Japanese handset users are extremely into video and photos - and the iPhone has neither a video camera nor multimedia text messaging. And a highlight feature many in Japan enjoy on their handset is a TV tuner, according to Kuittinen.

SanDisk on Tuesday said it will begin mass producing flash memory cards with an unprecedented 64 gigabytes of storage capacity.

"The microSD form factor has grown in popularity due to rising demand for high capacity storage on mobile phones, and X3 will enable us to bring exciting new products to this market," said SanDisk executive vice president Yoram Cedar.

Sixty years ago the "modern computer" was born in a lab in Manchester.

The room-sized computer's ability to carry out different tasks - without having to be rebuilt - has led some to describe it as the "first modern PC".

Using just 128 bytes of memory, it successfully ran its first set of instructions - to determine the highest factor of a number - on 21 June 1948.

Currently no police stations, border entry points or job centres have readers for the card's biometric chip, the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) revealed in response to an FoI (Freedom of Information) request by silicon.com about the £4.7bn identity cards scheme.

With no readers in place, police and immigration officers are currently still relying on traditional methods of checking ID cardholders' identity, running a fresh set of prints against existing identity databases.

Cambridge University security expert Richard Clayton told silicon.com: "If this capability is not there then the biometrics are, in short, a waste of time."

The defense industry giant on Monday said tests of its Laser Avenger system in December marked "the first time a combat vehicle has used a laser to shoot down a UAV," or unmanned aerial vehicle.

Boeing didn't go into much detail about the shoot-down. A representative of the company said the kilowatt-class laser "burned a hole" through the UAV.

Bucking the open-source trend, the British Royal Navy has developed a modified version of Microsoft Windows XP and has begun installing it on its fleet of nuclear submarines.

Given that Windows runs on approximately 85 percent of the world's PCs, there is a good chance sailors are familiar with it. However, so are hackers -- both the amateur and the cyber warfare pro variety. Not a problem, according to BAE, since all hack-prone elements of Windows "were tended to during the modification."

On a crisp Friday morning in October, the final truckload of VHS tapes rolled out of a Palm Harbor, Fla., warehouse run by Ryan J. Kugler, the last major supplier of the tapes.

Kugler estimates that 2 million tapes are still sitting on shelves of his clients' stores across the country, but they are the last analog soldiers in the lost battle against the digital invasion. "I'm not sure a lot of people are going to miss VHS," he said, "but it's been good to us."

The German automobile federation VDA slammed on Tuesday an EU compromise on rules to cut CO2 emissions from new cars, saying it ignored the sector's current crisis.

"Globally, the project does not take enough account of the automobile industry's difficult situation," a VDA statement said.

The deal establishes a sliding scale until 2015 and different targets for various automakers, a key position of German companies, which produce generally bigger cars that consume more fuel.

A rambling article in today's CIOL notes "the terror strike on Mumbai has once again brought to the fore how technology, especially in the communication front, is being used for anti-social, or to be precise antihuman, activities."

The article melodramatically shrieks "a terrorist can safely use a satellite phone or even a micro blogging system to implement the mission of terror".

Max Burnet has got it all. Burnet has turned his home in the leafy suburbs of Sydney into arguably Australia's, if not the world's, largest private computer museum.

Every available space from his basement to the top floor of his two-storey home is covered with relics from the past. On top of his hardware collection are numerous punch cards, tape machines (including the original paper tape) and over 6000 computer reference books.