SONY has taken the wraps off its long-rumoured slim version of the PlayStation 3 videogame console and slashed the price.

THE federal Health Minister says cuts in to private health insurance rebate for wealthy couples could fund a national e-health program.

(Telecompaper) Canadian operator Rogers Cable Communications has launched Rogers Ultimate High-Speed Internet, a 50 Mbps service for its residential customers. By subscribing to the 50 Mbps internet service combined with the Docsis 3.0 N gateway, customers will experience high-speed service. This service combination allows multiple computing devices to be connected anywhere in the house. The Ultimate Internet service is currently available in select areas of Greater Toronto for CAD 149.99 a month and will be rolled out further in the coming months, with respective download and upload speed of up to 50 Mbps and up to 2 Mbps and a monthly usage allowance of 175 GB. Rogers is also boosting the download speed for its Extreme Plus tier of service to 25 Mbps from 10 Mbps with an increased usage allowance of 125 GB per month at no extra charge to residential customers.

TECHNOLOGY will be key to Qantas's cost-cutting target of $1.5 billion over three years, chief executive Alan Joyce says.

With the recession causing thousands of redundancies in the IT industry, it seems SMEs could prove a safe port in the economic storm for tech workers. Small and medium-sized businesses are far less likely to cut the number of IT staff they employ this year, according to new research.

(Telecompaper) Telekom Austria Group reports revenues of EUR 2.389 billion for the first half of this year, down 5.8 percent from the same period last year. Revenues for the second quarter fell 6.6 percent to EUR 1.192 billion. The decrease was primarily due to lower revenues in the Fixed Net segment, resulting from lower wholesale revenues and voice volumes as well as the sale of the Fixed Net subsidiaries in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland. Despite a 6.7 percent reduction in total operating expenses, the group's EBITDA dropped 5.2 percent to EUR 904.8 million, due to lower contributions from both business segments, while the quarterly EBITDA fell 3.9 percent to EUR 450 million. Operating income declined 6.9 percent to EUR 350.3 million for the first half and decreased 2.2 percent to EUR 170.2 million in the second quarter, with a higher contribution from the Fixed Net segment partly compensating for a lower operating income in the Mobile Communication segment. Telekom Austria

Researchers said on Tuesday they are seeing something unusual in the malware world - a virus that targets a development environment. The virus, dubbed Win32.Induc, was written to infect applications built with Delphi, according to Nick Bilogorskiy, manager of antivirus researcher at SonicWall. Delphi is used to write Windows programs, including database applications.

(Telecompaper) Broadband is growing more than expected in the UK, as in many countries around the world, according to research by Point Topic. Britain added 445,000 net new broadband lines in the first half to reach over 17.8 million in total, about 100,000 more than Point Topic forecast at the beginning of the year. The number of net additions forecast for this year is now 900,000, some 240,000 (36%) more than before. Point Topic now also projects over 23 million broadband lines in the UK by the end of 2013, nearly 1.2 million more than in its last forecast. Point Topic's figures show there are still over 9 million 'no-net' homes, and the number is falling only slowly. Thus, even by 2014 there will still be 6.5 million homes without internet access. There is a long way to go to meet the government's target of 90 percent coverage of IP broadband by 2017 as well. Coverage is actually negligible today although it is expected to increase quickly over the next year, and Point Topic forecas

In the beginning... The inventor of the first commercial mobile phone - the brick-like Motorola DynaTAC 8000X (pictured above) - probably had an inkling the device would one day become as light and sleek as the Razr below. But did he dream it might end up looking more like a sheet of stained glass? Or be as bendy as a pack of origami card? Probably not - yet tech companies' R&D labs are already experimenting with such sci-fi-esque devices, although they remain largely on the drawing board for now.

(Telecompaper) Orange UK has launched Social Life, a mobile social networking aggregator which displays users' activity on Facebook, MySpace and Bebo in a single home screen. Accessible from Orange's mobile internet portal Orange World, Social Life allows customers to view and post updates and get in touch with friends and family across all three social networks at the same time through a single log-in. Available to all Orange mobile customers, the Social Life home screen allows users to upload photos, update their status, keep track of friends' status updates from all three social networks, view social network notifications including messages, events, pokes and friend requests, and send and receive messages. Customers have full control over which information they provide to each of their social networks - they can update their status and upload photos to some or all of them through the Social Life home screen. Social Life also allows customers to set up free text alerts on specific so