Considering hitting the shops at the weekend? Looking for inspiration? Check out the latest in our series of gadget mini-reviews, courtesy of silicon.com's sister site CNET.co.uk, the home of technology reviews. For the full review and details, click on the link below.

What is it: Touchscreen smartphone with Qwerty keyboard

Feeling festive? Then you need silicon.com's seasonal guide to the best Christmas apps for Apple's iPhone.

First up is the Solar System app, a cosmic take on the advent calendar that lets you journey to the earth's neighbouring planets.

Web heavyweights have hit out against the Digital Economy Bill, claiming clauses in the legislation could put the UK's digital future at risk.

In an open letter to the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills Peter Mandelson, published yesterday, representatives of eBay, Facebook, Google and Yahoo! call on the government to abandon "measures which risk stifling innovation and damaging the government's vision for a Digital Britain".

Radio and tagging technologies have loads of promise - though the applications may not be quite what you were expecting, says Quocirca's Rob Bamforth.

RFID and its close cousin near field communications (NFC) have both been touted for great and sexy futuristic applications. These range from the tagging and tracking of all consumer goods to the conversion of mobile phones into all purpose 'super wallets' where simply waving the phone at the checkout would pay for your items.

This month saw California's Hacker Dojo host the Random Hacks of Kindness event, which brought independent coders together with developers from Google, Microsoft, Nasa, Yahoo! and other organisations to work on projects to help with disaster relief.

See more photos from the hackathon here.

Anti-ageism legislation isn't working and the IT industry continues to discriminate against older techies. That's the verdict of the exclusive 2009 silicon.com Skills Survey.

The majority (51 per cent) of survey respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the IT industry discriminates against older workers, compared with less than a fifth (18 per cent) who held the opposite view.

November's top stories on silicon.com tackled some big questions: does my business need an office? Can I work solely on a netbook? Will the UK ever create a Google, Microsoft or Oracle of its very own?

November also dealt with the perennial question of will the UK's ID cards programme ever run to plan?

Compiled on the M6 driving to Liverpool and dispatched to silicon.com a couple of weeks later via a free wi-fi connection in my hotel.

I just cannot work any faster or smarter - I seem to have exhausted every degree of freedom, every element of efficiency improvement I can muster.

eBay has released an app for BlackBerry.

The application, co-developed by the auction site and RIM, lets users search, track and buy items using their smartphone.

At Orange's biannual La Collection event in Paris, the mobile operator gives a sneak peek at the technology set for future release.

silicon.com went along to the 10th La Collection event last week to take a look at the gadgets and services set to make their way into consumers' hands in the coming months and years.

Tesco Mobile has announced today it will stock Apple's iPhone 3G and 3GS.

Apple ended its two-year UK exclusive deal with O2 this month by launching the iPhone on the Orange network. Vodafone also announced an agreement with Apple in September, and will start offering the iPhone next year.

Enterprise take-up of unified communications - the merging of IP telephony, conferencing and collaboration, messaging and communications tools - is on a "steeply rising curve", according to analysts.

Spending on UC among businesses worldwide is expected to rise from just $302m last year to $4.2bn in five years' time, according to industry watchers ABI Research.

Marketing emails are at risk of being blocked as spam because businesses are not correctly managing the email communications they send out, a survey has found.

More than half of the 157 marketing managers surveyed by the DMA Email Marketing Council said their business did not restrict the number of messages that could be sent to an email account in a given period.

The icy winds of economic gloom have put paid to talk of a tech skills shortage - at least for now, the exclusive 2009 silicon.com Skills Survey can reveal.

While the proportion of respondents reporting empty IT seats dipped in 2008 after several years of rising steadily, this year's result shows a much steeper decline as the worldwide economic recession mothballs big tech projects and puts recruitment hopes on ice. With less positions for job hunters to choose from it seems employers are having less difficulty filling the few vacancies that do pop up.

Mobile maker Sony Ericsson has debuted another phone in its Xperia range - but with a twist.

The see-through display is a world first, according to Sony Ericsson, requiring battery, memory card and antenna to be miniaturised to fit inside the bottom portion of the device.

The privileged users that manage your IT systems must be monitored as closely - if not more - than standard users, says Bob Tarzey.

Within any organisation, a small group of employees have the ability to wreak havoc on its IT infrastructure: the privileged users that manage it. Granting privileges to such users is necessary for them to be able to do their job but when things go wrong the consequences can be serious.

Unified communications is migrating to the cloud, new research has found.

According to a report by analysts In-Stat, tech vendors are now working closely with providers of hosted VoIP services, leading to several flavours of unified communications now emerging from the cloud.

A second iPhone worm has been identified.

Like the first worm - unearthed last month - to attack iPhones, this latest exploit also affects jailbroken devices with SSH (secure shell) protocol-enabled and unchanged default passwords.

Google Chrome, that's just a web browser isn't it?Not anymore. Google have used their Chrome browser as the basis for a new operating system that shares the same name.

Don't tell me I have to shell out for another OS, I've just bought Windows 7.You wouldn't be able to buy the Chrome OS even if you wanted to. Firstly it's free, and secondly you will not be able to install it on existing machines. The OS will only come pre-installed on new computers, initially on netbooks from the latter part of 2010.

Despite the cost-cutting forced on many organisations by the recession, pay packets for the IT management team have held up - and for some even grown.

According to the exclusive silicon.com 2009 Skills Survey a greater proportion of IT chiefs are now taking home bigger pay packets than in last year's survey.