According to La Repubblica, (repubblica.it) the phone will be sold by both Vodafone and Telecom Italia. For 9 months the phone can be blocked to work with only the distributing network, then it can be changed for a fee; and after 18 months, for no fee. A third-generation phone, 9.2 mm thick. Two versions 8 & 16Gb. There is also talk of a white model and a Ferrari red one...

Photosynthesis technology? Shouldn't it be green?

Never. High-resolution satellites are in low earth orbit (QuickBird's is 450 km) and have their target in view for only a few minutes. The revisit interval is several days. The sensor scans the earth as the satellite flies -- more like a fax machine than a camera -- in a swath 16.5 km wide. A single QuickBird scene can be over 2 GB in size. In theory you could probably get live video from a geostationary satellite, but from 36,000 km the resolution will be in tens or hundreds of metres, not centimetres. Using a constellation of birds reduces the revisit, but for continuous monitoring I'd guess you would need hundreds of them and you'd still only get one shot per pass. Anyway, try working out the cost of continuous live video monitoring at say, 50 cm resolution, of all the Earth's land masses. At HD quality, each frame would be 2 megapixels and would cover only 860 x 540 metres. It wouldn't even be very interesting most of the time.

This story is Engadget getting hold of entirely the wrong end of the stick. In fact this satellite has nothing to do with Google Earth -- this article quite wrongly gives the impression that it is Google's mission -- but it is a panchromatic-only (black & white) instrument aimed at the defence market. So you won't be seeing much of its imagery -- certainly not on Google Earth. The Keyhole Google bought has nothing to do with the ultra-secret Keyhole satellites (KH-11 etc), operated by your own beloved U.S. Govt, which are the size and cost of Hubble (and you won't be seeing their imagery any time soon, either.)

Launch is at 11:35 a.m. PDT (18:35 GMT)

Panchromatic means black and white, or rather, grayscale. QuickBird imagery, which is the 60 cm natural colour imagery you see on Google Earth (look for the DigitalGlobe copyright), comes in five bands: 4 multi-spectral (3 visible, 1 near-IR) at down to 2.4 metres pixel size and 1 pan at down to 60 cm pixel size. The high-res. colour imagery you see comes from combining the colour of the multi-spectral bands (using the visible light bands for - roughly - natural colour) with the geometry of the pan band. The pan band stretches down into near-IR so getting the colour right is tricky.

WorldView-1 has only panchromatic, at 50 cm, no colour. WorldView-2 will be multi-spectral. There is an introduction to high-res. satellite imagery here: http://www.eurimage.com/faq/faq.html.

Launch is at 11:35 a.m. PDT (18:35 GMT). http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/space/bls/missions/worldview-1/ on September 18.

WV-1 is panchromatic only and aimed at the defence market so don't expect to see too much imagery on Google Earth (No, it's not Google's satellite). At best it should free up QuickBird for more civilian work

I'd like to be able to exclude all phone news. I hate the wretched little things, but I don't want to have to subscribe to a whole lot of separate engadget feeds.

'incredulous', 'antithesis', decimate', 'shore up' - are you guys doing this on purpose? That's just this week!

I'm going to start a 'Digg vocabulary howler of the day' blog...

'spurs', not 'spurns'. Friday it was 'antithesis' for 'apotheosis'. Don't use ten-dollar words if you have a five-dollar vocabulary. Somebody get these guys a dictionary for Christmas.