Boy is this starting to get confusing. After Microsoft weighed in with a massive $40 billion offer for Yahoo, rejected for ‘undervaluing’ the company, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has now stepped in.

According to the Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal, News Corp is in talks about a deal which would see Yahoo merge with MySpace. The Aussie tycoon snapped up the social network in 2005.

Details remain sketchy, but it’s believed News Corp would take a 20% stake, allowing Google’s main rival to remain independent.

Having access to the likes of MySpace could potentially make Yahoo a more realistic competitor to Google, and would probably be a more attractive option than straiking a deal with MSN.

This one looks like it could drag on for the best part of the year. As ever, as soon as we get sniff of some news, you’ll be the first to know.

You’re in a new city, you no speaka da lingo, and you fancy a pint. You can either talk loudly in English in the hope the locals will understand, or you can use your phone to find where there’s cold beer and hot women.

The new Rough Guides java application has info on 330 cities in 22 European countries, with points of interest like restaurants, sights, bars, cafes, hotels and music and theatre.

You can also add comments like “I’ll be here at 7pm,” or “they spit in your food here,” and send a map to friends also using it.

You pay how much, English pigdog? It costs just £4.50, and downloading new cities is the price of a couple of texts. Worth it to avoid annoyed locals directing you to El Grothole.

Surfers: Is the sound of the waves beginning to pall? Strap the cleverly named SwiMP3 (do you see?) to your arm and go surfin’ in the USA. Or Truro, if money’s tight. If you have no money at all the 3m underwater survival rate on this player also means that bath time can be to the blissful sounds of Belle and Sebastian.

Now granted, the 256MB capacity is so low you almost feel embarrassed for it and with its ugly, outsized, unresponsive buttons, the SwiMP3 is far from sexy. The circular shape looks more like a child’s watch than an MP3 player.

The terrifyingly flanged headphones- we swear we felt them touching the brain- are by far the worst we’ve tested straight from the box. With so much echo, lord knows what they’d sound like in the ocean.

Battery life is also pretty poor. You’ll get 10 hour playback, but compared to other players on the market that can last for up to 30 hours such as the Samsung T10 this is pretty poultry.

But hey, how may other players cam survive up to 3m underwater? Exactly.

Filed under: Cellphones, Gaming

Sorry Gizmondo, your dreams of a resurrected user generated gaming platform were just usurped by Nokia. Straight outta Espoo comes Nokia’s Yamake (a mashup for “you make the game”) for their N-Gage platform. With it, Nokia says players can “create their own games” from a range of “mini games” by adding user generated text, pictures, sound clips and movies. Games can then be shared via the N-Gage Arena and via MMS between N-Gage compatible S60 devices. The press release specifically mentions the creation of mini games “such as” pictures puzzles and quizzes — so no, we’re not looking at user generated, 3D first person shooters upon initial release. In fact, without any images or video to accompany the press release, Yamake sounds more like a user customization platform than game creation platform. Still, we’ll cut them some slack on this initial release. One thing seems pretty clear though, this ain’t your mama’s sidetalkin‘ N-Gage; Nokia is playing for keeps this time around.

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Filed under: Cellphones

So it looks like Pieter Knook, SVP of Microsoft’s Mobile Communications Business, is out, according to the WSJ. We’re not entirely sure why he’s retiring (when we met him last year he seemed sprightly enough), but he’ll be replaced by Andrew Lees, VP of Server & Tools Marketing and Solutions Group, a man that’s spent the last decade on MSDN and TechNet stuff. So, you know, the guy clearly knows the mobile space inside and out. The move comes just in time, too — what Windows Mobile really needs right now is somebody to come in and make it more business-centric.

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