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Palm has announced that it’s popular Centro smartphone has launched on Australia’s Telestra network. Priced at $299 the handset will come in Glacier White and feature a dedicated link to the network’s BigPond service, allowing them to access exclusive content.

“Pre-Paid mobile phone users now have access to a number of features not available on standard mobile handsets with the addition of the Palm Centro to the Telstra Pre-Paid range. The Palm Centro will allow customers to stay on top of email and text messages, as well as access the Internet, manage appointments, view documents or make use of a multitude of other productivity-boosting and entertaining features.“ said Tim Copper,Telestra’s director of Consumer and Marketing.“

The Centro will be sold locked to the network, but Telestra says an unlocked version may be available in the future. Telestra’s Centro is a quad-band GSM/EDGE smartphone running Palm OS Garnet v5.4.9. It has a 320x320 pixel touchscreen display, Bluetooth v1.2, a 1.3-megapixel camera with video capture and 64MB of RAM with a micro SD slot. The US version is Palm’s best and fastest selling smartphone ever.

Via [PalmInfoCenter]

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Ian Usher, a 44-year old resident of Perth, Australia who’s originally from Darlington, England, is doing a big spring cleaning. For one week on eBay starting on June 22, he will auction off every part of his current life, from his house and all of its contents, even going as far as introducing the winner to his friends and to his job where he works for a rug importer. Although he loves his life in Perth and has the support of his employer and friends, everything sadly reminds him of his five-year marriage that broke up a year ago. After the auction, Usher wants to start all over in life with nothing but his wallet and his passport in his pockets, and do some traveling.

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Sections: Gadgets / Other, Lifestyle, Miscellaneous, Web

A battle is emerging in Australia where the government wants “internet service providers to filter content to ensure households and schools do not receive inappropriate material” while civil libertarians “have condemned the plan as unnecessary, and say it will erode the freedom of the internet.“

As the main thrust of the governments argument is to protect children from violence and porn it is very hard to argue against it without sounding like you don’t care. On the other hand though once governments start determining what is right and wrong for us before we even make our own choices that seems equally as wrong.

Personally I think it is the responsibility of the parents to monitor and control what the children watch and have access to. Sure it is tough but that is what parenting is all about!

Via [BBC]

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Sections: Web

Australian Dell fans rejoice, it looks like your long awaited Inspiron 1525 laptops are going to be ready for shipment pretty soon. I guess Dell wanted to get these laptops there before the new year, however, they won’t ship until January 9, 2008.

These laptops are nothing too too special, but still make for a nice laptop. It begins with a 15.4-inch display, 2GHz T7250 Core 2 Duo processor, X3100 integrated graphics, a nice 2GB of RAM, 160GB of hard drive space, and integrated Wi-Fi. The price of these laptops aren’t half bad either, selling for AU$1399, which is around $1228. As previously mentioned, it will start shipping on January 9, 2008, and hopefully we’ll see it hit the US sometime soon.

Via [Engadget]

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