Apple chooses European iPhone carriers

Apple has selected T-Mobile, O2 and Orange as its European launch partners for the iPhone after wrangling a revenue-sharing agreement, reports the Financial Times.

According to CNET News.com, the four companies are set to announce their partnership by the end of the month.

The deals would require the carriers to share 10% of all revenue from voice and data services over the iPhone with Apple, according to the report. Apple has a revenue-sharing agreement in place with AT&T, the exclusive iPhone carrier in the US.

Toshiba will start producing a 320GB hard-disk drive for laptop computers before the end of this year, the company said yesterday.

PC World reports it is the first 2.5-inch drive to be announced at that capacity, with production to begin in the fourth quarter. Pricing was not announced.

The drive is one of a series of five that make up Toshiba's new MKxx52SX family of hard-disk drives.

Competitors are ratcheting up the pressure on Apple's dominant iTunes music store, with a blizzard of new online retailers being launched with support from the record industry, says The Independent.

Wal-Mart, the world's largest retail company, said yesterday it would undercut iTunes with sales of music downloads that can be played on an unlimited number of digital players.

The music channel MTV merged its Urge music store with RealNetworks' Rhapsody download service to try to mount a more serious challenge to iTunes.

Far away in a distant forest, researchers have opened a new frontier in the study of infectious disease, says Channel 4.

Zul'Gurub is the site of an outbreak of "corrupted blood" - a deadly plague that can kill weaker humans in seconds, but can last in animals for much longer.

Zul'Gurub is not a remote village in the Amazon or the Congo, but a jungle area in the online computer game World of Warcraft.