The manufacturer of a notebook PC battery that was seen exploding in dramatic TV footage apparently skipped safety tests when it tested newer battery models.

Video of the notebook PC exploding in flames shocked viewers and drove down the share prices of its manufacturer, LG Electronics, and battery maker, LG Chem.

Games publisher Eidos has deleted hundreds of user complaints from its forums following claims that a journalist was fired for his negative review of its new game, Kane and Lynch. “There will be no further discussion”, an Eidos forum administrator bluntly warned visitors, describing the complaints, some of which were abusive, as “ugly spam”.

Prices for PDA-style Windows SideShow devices will start from about $80, according to a developer that demonstrated prototypes to Texyt.com today. The touchscreen handheld gadgets share many of the features of PDAs, smartphones, and media players like Apple's iPod, but they connect wirelessly to a PC to send or receive data.

Apple acknowledges that portable media players, a class of products which includes the iPod, can cause hearing damage, according to a newly published patent application filed by the company. The application describes a method of reducing the risk of hearing loss. The document, which does not mention the iPod by name, was originally filed one month before a class action lawsuit which alleges the iPod series' design may exacerbate hearing loss.

The world's first open source mobile phone will be available this September priced at $350, its developers have confirmed. The FIC Neo1973's final printed circuit board design is complete, said OpenMoko staff at the Computex trade show in Taipei, Taiwan, today.

UPDATED May 9: Google News has removed a prominent news source which had faced questions over possible 'gaming' of Google's news gathering algorithm.

"To ensure a high quality service for our end users, we periodically review our index of news sources, particularly following user complaints, and have recently removed some sources that do not meet our criteria as news organizations, including Playfuls.com," a Google spokesperson told Texyt today.

Google News is generated by software which scours more than 4000 sources worldwide and displays the stories that it determines most newsworthy. A number of sources appear to have been dropped on or around April 26, they include Playfuls.com, a popular news website.

Until recently, links to Playfuls' news articles had been extremely prominent on Google News. The site ranked 16^th amongst Google News' English-language sources, placing higher than many better-known news organizations according to Newsknife. However, on April 26, new links to Playfuls abruptly stopped appearing at Google News.