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The Sony Ericsson Vivaz is the HD-video-shooting successor to the Swedish-Japanese firm’s flagship Satio model. With an 8.1MP camera that can also record 720p HD video, it is designed to thrill YouTube-rs with its easy video upload features as well as the bundled 8GB memory card for ample storage. The touchscreen phone has been ergonomically designed to fit the contours of the hand and with social networking and multi-media features galore, the Sony Ericsson Vivaz is set to give the likes of the Nokia X6 and the LG InTouch Max GW620 a run for their money.

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While there is currently a cool 32 million people regularly playing FarmVille on a daily basis on Facebook, the social network has made a plea to games developers to create ‘iconic games’ such as Mario, Halo or Sonic for the platform. Facebook Platform Manager, Gareth Davis, speaking at this week’s Games Developers Conference in San Francisco, reminded devs that the next killer game was out there and that Facebook was ready to help to host it and popularise it. Research suggests around three quarters of Facebook’s 400m users regularly play social games on the site. “The next killer game is still out there and this game will come from you,” Gareth Davis told a room of designers in San Francisco. “When we look at every major game platform, we see that there is an iconic defining game on that platform whether it’s Sonic or Mario or Halo.

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With the internet fragmenting and every community becoming alienated from its peers, specialist social networks have been springing up to act as a kind of glue and arbitrarily stick all our disparate groups of friends together. Flickr has photos covered, Last.fm deals with music, SocialPicks gives stock tips, LinkedIn serves people who like wearing ties and Facebook reconnects you with people you don’t really want to know… and then they all plug into each other. The ostensible focus of free social network Foursquare is finding ’stuff to do’.

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Much like Google Wave, the first problem with Buzz is trying to neatly encapsulate just what it is. It’s a dash of Twitter, a bit of FriendFeed, a smidgen of Google Reader plus several other services – most notably Foursquare’s location check-in system for mobile devices. At its heart, though, the idea is for Gmail to be your social hub rather than just your mailbox, with friends’ status updates, videos, photos and more, all presented in one handy list. The service rolled out literally overnight, giving Buzz user numbers that other budding networks can only dream of

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After giving the most boringly obvious clue in the world , Nokia has debuted the new C5 at CeBit. The phone is the first in the new C-Series from Nokia, which seems to be the budget smartphone range from the Finns. The C5 will run Symbian S60 3rd edition, which means it just falls into the category of smartphone. This is impressive when you consider that it only costs €135 (£120) unsubsidised, with a decent feature set behind. Granted, the screen is only a 2.2-inch display, but there’s a 3.2MP camera, GPS for the free Ovi Maps navigation tool as well as a 2GB memory card in the box

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“FYI Bobsy. Seychelles. West Beach Bar, North Island. Sunday

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Straw poll: how many social networks, instant messaging platforms and online email tools do you have accounts with? Of those, how many do you actually use? The proliferation of online communication services over the last decade has been rampant.

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Yahoo is planning to integrate Twitter into all its sites, meaning users can read and write Tweets without having to leave the portal. The move is designed to use the popularity of the micro-blogging site to increase Yahoo’s appeal to users. Yahoo already has a similar deal in place with Facebook, positioning itself to be a hub for social networking. Bryan Lamkin, senior vice president, consumer products group, Yahoo, explained: “Let me try to capture the enormity of this integration in 140 characters or less: We’re turning the key to the online social universe — you will find the most personally relevant experiences through Yahoo

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Zynga’s Facebook game FarmVille now has an impressive 80 million users on the social networking site, according to AllFacebook’s Application Statistics study. FarmVille is growing at an incredible rate, with the game’s monthly active users having grown by ten million in one month . Exponential growth The popular animal husbandry game currently has in the region of 31 million daily active users, up from 27 million daily active users that were reported back on Feb 2, 2009. The weekly active user figure is now at 54 million up from 49 million on February 2. The latest FarmVille user stats show that Zynga’s game has attracted four million daily active users in under two weeks – an incredible rate of 35 per cent growth

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HTC might have released two behemoths in the Legend and Desire, but it’s shown it wants to keep a hand in the Windows Mobile game by releasing the compact-yet-powerful HTC HD Mini. The phone has measurements of 103.8mm x 57mm x 11.7mm, and while it’s not the slimmest or tiniest mobile on the market, it certainly has some decent ideas behind it to make sure it’s not seen as lagging behind its high profile Android brothers . The first element is the industrial design, with a smooth black metal chassis held in place by four obvious screws. HTC told us that this was actually fairly hard to design, as the supporting screws are usually in more random places, and it was quite a task to get it put together in this way.

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