Nokia is sending word that they've just opened up the Dutch branch of their online Music Store service, accessible by either PC or their mobile phones. The store's opening also comes with a limited-time promo, which you can read over in the full article.

Before getting rid of your old mobile phone for a new one, you may consider doing this as a farewell ritual to your old phone: throwing it away. Literally.

In Savonlinna, Finland, mobile phone throwing is actually a local event. Contestants to the mobile phone abuse-a-thon engage in various activities such as mobile phone juggling and phone throwing.

For some of the participants, mobile phone juggling is actually an artistic endeavor. Taco Cohen, a contestant hailing from the Netherlands, used his training as a circus performer to nab the freestyle gold medal in the event. When asked about how it is to juggle cellular phones, he said, "Juggling I have done for many years with balls. (But) these are irregular shapes and weights, it is difficult."

Another contestant, Tommi Houtari, added his impression on the mobile phone-throwing event. "I have never thrown a phone before but have been participating in potato-throwing ... surprisingly, a potato flies further."

The strange (yet possibly cathartic) activity has drawn a large crowd from other countries such as Canada, US, and some neighboring European countries.

The make or model of the phones used in the event were not disclosed.

When it comes to predicting how Earth would look like hundreds of years from now, there are two schools of thought dominating the field of science. First are the conservatives who believe global warming, exhaustion of fuel cells, and destruction of the environment will ultimately lead to our extinction. The second group is the liberals, who think that Homo Sapiens are far too advanced to let these things end their existence - they maintain that we'll be able to come up with scientific methods to clear pollution, produce alternatives for energy, or if all else fails, create a colony of our own outer space.

We're neither fans of human extinction nor are we narcissistic fools, but this latest technological wonder from Netherlands can further fan the flames of that debate.

The folks over at the Delft University of Technology has come up with a solar-powered mouse (not live ones silly, we're talking about computer peripherals here). According to the press release they issued, Sole Mio was designed to be used by anyone with access to sunlight, or even artificial light. The technology behind this product enables it to charge power from sources of light, making it available for the owner's usage. Here's a text from the press release:

With solar energy, under ideal circumstances charging can occur a factor of five times quicker than in the current situation. Over time it is estimated that several hundred million batteries could be saved annually on a global scale. The net environmental benefit is still restricted by the high energy content of current PV cells. However the introduction of new types of cheap and energy-extensive PV cells, on which TU Delft and partners are working, would eventually yield an even higher environmental gain.

So they're looking into making this more environment friendly in the long run. Is this then the first step towards what the liberal wing in science believes as the next stage of man's evolution? Can humans actually create ways to destroy the planet and save itself at the same time?

Wake me up from cryostasis when a solar-powered race is in charge of the planet.

In the endless list of cell phone-cum-some-other-gadget fusions, the cameraphone tops most people's list of favorites. Others love their gaming phones, others can't have enough of their media player phones. Then again, there are really so many possible phone fusions we could think of to actually name a possible favorite. A lighter phone would suit smokers. An electric zapper phone would be the favorite of, say, policemen, and those who seek to have a rollicking good electronic zapping time...

Now, some people in the Netherlands thought of another way to fuse the relatively modern cellphone with the relatively old gadget, plain old doorbell. As you know, we don't really pay much attention to the doorbell. So these guys decided to put the doorbell in a new light and upgrade it to include a GSM function. Thus, the GSM doorbell was born.

The only difference with the Waleli doorbell and a normal doorbell is that the Waleli doorbell can ring up a homeowner's mobile phone. When a homeowner is in some errand somewhere and a friend rings up at their door, a call will be sent to the homeowner's phone and the friend will be able to talk to the homeowner via a panel next to the doorbell. The resident can also open the door to their home from anywhere else, using a secret code typed on their mobile keypad.

The GSM doorbell is already being sold by property developers in the Netherlands and is coming soon to other parts of the world. The company, and some eager absent-minded folks who constantly fall into the habit of losing their house keys have named numerous ways in which the Waleli GSM doorbell could be useful, but some of us wonder: could a lost mobile phone be hacked to let strangers into a house? Uh, we didn't give you that idea...

We are all quite familiar with homebrew applications like games and programs for our DS. What we quite don't know is that somewhere in the DS universe (quite specifically in The Netherlands), Infrared function is being developed. And with 60% of all the work already done, it is fast nearing completion.

Dubbed InfrareDS, the idea was thought of by Mark (frozenone23@hotmail.com). And the whole project is exactly just that: it adds an IrDA to the Nintendo DS in just few minutes, allowing the user to send images and sounds from a mobile phone and vice versa.. As of now, InfrareDS is compatible with Sony Ericsson (T310, K750i),  Panasonic X60 and Nokia 8850.

Although it has not been tested yet for DS lite, InfrareDS features direct compatibility to all firmware versions of NDS, not to mention its high speed transmission capability. Currently, Mark is working on the touchscreen function and making a graphical interface.

We thank Kravos for this exciting heads up.

Palm is beginning to get chummy with other companies for the improvement of their product line. Recently, they have announced that it has forged a new relationship with Vodafone targeted at expanding the adoption of wireless push email in Europe - the end product? A more luscious and feature-packed Palm Treo Smartphone.

The planned Treo Smartphone will operate on Vodafone's 3G/UMTS network and delivering the Palm experience on top of the Microsoft Windows Mobile(R) operating system. Nice concept right? Unfortunately, if you don't live in Europe, you won't be able to take advantage of this development. The new Treo smartphone will be available first to Vodafone customers in multiple European countries, including the UK, Germany, Spain, Italy and Netherlands, before the end of the calendar year.

Palm decided to adopt this strategy because they want to improve the percentage of business email inboxes accessed via mobile. In the U.S., the percentage is very high, but worldwide, a market research group - The Radicati Group - found out in their study that only an estimated 2 percent of business email inboxes worldwide are accessed via mobile.

For now, there isn't much info on what the new Treo Smartphone may look like and what are its added features, but definitely more info will be pouring in the coming weeks, so watch out for that.