Keyspan announced its new RF Remote for Front Row–a sleek and powerful RF remote control designed specifically for use with Apple’s Front Row multimedia software. Keyspan’s new remote uses a RF signal that works through walls and furniture, delivers a range of 60 feet or more, and features a set of 9 buttons which allow a user to control Front Row software, eject a CD or DVD, put the Mac to sleep and wake it up.

Exactly a year after it was launched in the United States, the Sony PlayStation Portable’s days as a hand-held movie-viewing device might be numbered. Disappointing sales have slowed the flow of movies on the proprietary Universal Media Disc to a mere trickle. At least two major studios have completely stopped releasing movies on UMD, while others are either toying with the idea or drastically cutting back. And retailers also are cutting the amount of shelf space they’ve been devoting to UMD movies, amid talk that Wal-Mart is about to dump the category entirely.

Sony’s dream of freeing TV from the confines of the living room is looking more like reality with a gadget that allows you to watch local broadcasts on a PC even if you are thousands of miles from home. Sony is notching up strong sales of a small black box that can do just that. The book-size device plugs into your home TV antenna, converts the signal to the MPEG-4 digital standard, encrypts it for security and streams it over the Internet to your PC. It also works with Sony’s PlayStation Portable handheld video game device and compatible mobile phones will be out soon.

Once again the specter of brain tumors from cell phone use has raised its head. The use of mobile phones over a long period of time can raise the risk for brain tumors, a new Swedish study said on Friday, contradicting the conclusions of other researchers. The Dutch Health Council, in an overview of research from around the world, last year found no evidence radiation from mobile phones and TV towers was harmful. A four-year British survey released in January showed no link between regular, long-term use of cell phones and the most common type of tumor. However, researchers at the Swedish National Institute for Working Life said they looked at the mobile phone use of 905 people between the age of 20 and 80 who had been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor and found a link.

A new product called Phraze-It offers comfortable, efficient and accurate finger-typing text entry and thumbing for entering a large amount of text into Pocket PCs. This intuitive and easy to use keyboard with multilingual support fits well on the touch screen of a PDA, leaves plenty of room for reviewing, correcting and editing text, provides capitalization, numbers, punctuation and symbols of a full-sized computer keyboard, and has large on-screen keys for finger-typing. Users can choose from a variety of eight keyboard layouts, as well as key designs & colors.

Proporta has released a selection of products to protect the XDA Atom. Accessories include the Alu-Leather case, sync and charge cable, an aluminum case, and screen protectors.

With daughter not having school yesterday, I was under the mistaken impression that it was Saturday, thus depriving our readers of their end-of-week news. This can sometimes happen when you work from home. As amends, I offer up yesterday’s news today.–Ed.

BoxWave announced the Styra-Ballpoint Pen for Audiovox 6700. Styra provides both a ballpoint pen and reset pin for a great multi-functional stylus. All of these additional functionalities fit perfectly into your handheld’s built-in stylus holder. Styra-Ballpoint Pen comes in black ink and is refillable for continued use with Styra-Ballpoint Pen Refills. The Audiovox 6700 is the same device as the Verizon VX6700 and Sprint PPC-6700 that we have recently covered.

Nuance Communications is trying to line up wireless carriers for a new service allowing hands-free, speech-to-text messages or emails of nearly unlimited length, as well as voice-command Web browsing and music downloads. Speech-recognition capability in cell phones has largely been confined to dumping a few voice commands into a phone’s memory to enable hands-free dialing. Nuance concedes its system–which would require connection with a remote server that has its software–is vulnerable to background noise interference. But Nuance says its technology has the same 99-percent speech-to-text conversion accuracy that the company claims for its latest personal-computer software.

Scores of fake name-brand mobile telephones and more than one dozen vendors have been arrested in recent raids in China’s commercial center of Shanghai. Confiscated phones that looked like pricey foreign models and bore the trademarks Sony Ericsson, Nokia, and Samsung were actually generic handsets assembled from cheap components.