German engineering giant Siemens is selling its mobile phones unit to much smaller Taiwanese rival BenQ, it said on Tuesday, drawing a line under hundreds of millions of euros of losses. BenQ will use the Siemens brand name for five years and will take over some high-profile sports sponsorship contracts, including one with star soccer team Real Madrid.

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd. will take court action against NTP after hitting an impasse in finalizing a patent dispute settlement, reopening a legal battle investors had been told was wrapped up. The Canadian company agreed in March to pay $450 million to end the long-running patent dispute with closely held NTP, a U.S.-based patent holding company in return for the right to continue its BlackBerry-related business without further interference from NTP or its patents.

GoAntiques.com announced that PriceMiner, its antiques and collectibles pricing service, is now accessible from a wide variety of handheld devices such as palmOne’s Treo 600 and 650, Sony Clie, Dell Axim and HP iPAQ models and any Web-capable SmartPhone. Access from handheld devices allows antique dealers, collectors and consumers to use PriceMiner to check detailed historical pricing information directly from the floor of antiques shows, auctions and anywhere else with access to the wireless Web.

Software company sfr GmbH announced the release of version 2.0 of their visNotes security solution for the Pocket PC. Instead of safeguarding their notes with the usual alphanumeric password, the user chooses several spots on a picture of his own choice to generate a visual key to his data. Version 2.0 of visNotes adds VGA compatibility, better support for Windows Mobile 2003 SE and landscape, a new user interface, and more.

This may well be destroying our lives. For the record, our best score is a 5. Warning: nothing particularly inappropriate for work, but likely will suck your brains out through your mouse. And yeah, we know it’s not relevant.

Japan has taken a step into the science-fiction world with the release of a robot suit that can help workers lift heavy loads or assist people with disabilities climb stairs. The 15-kilogram (33-pound) battery-powered suit, code-named HAL-5, detects muscle movements through electrical-signal flows on the skin surface and then amplifies them. It can also move on its own accord, enabling it to help elderly or handicapped people walk.

Saunders, which has built a strong reputation for manufacturing high quality aluminum, leather and more recently silicone cases for handheld electronics including PDAs and MP3 players under its RhinoSkin line, announced that it will begin bundling cases and accessories for the Sony PlayStation Portable later this year. The bundles will include top quality cases that will protect the Sony PSP from drops and dings, packaged with RhinoSkin accessories that will enhance the user’s experience including screen protectors, car chargers, USB cables, and more. As it does with its other cases, RhinoSkin will include a complimentary StuffBak label with all of the Sony PSP case bundles, which provides loss-protection and recovery service if the portable device is lost or stolen, and feature a lifetime guarantee.

C-guys, designer and developer of SD and SDIO solutions for home, SOHO and SMB applications and TradeWind Technologies announced they are building upon their relationship to include SDIO RFID technology for Palm devices. TradeWind uses CG-100 SDIO technology by C-guys to increase the number of Palm devices its RFID cards will work with.

SYWARE announced Hewlett-Packard iPAQ hx4705 users can run SYWARE’s Visual CE software on their Pocket PCs. SYWARE empowers mobile users to collect data and create feature-rich database applications that can be deployed on any Windows Mobile Pocket PC or Windows CE device–wherever they need to work. Business or user-specific data can be downloaded, collected, displayed, modified and automatically synchronized. SYWARE enables users to create feature-rich, easy-to-use database applications without programming. SYWARE solutions enable users to build applications, on desktops or handhelds, 10 times faster than other market alternatives.

Over the next two weeks, you may notice a difference in when and how much news gets posted. That’s because I’m taking a bit of a mini-vacation from the news. I’ll likely be posting something each day, just not as much as normal, and probably not at a time you’re used to.–James Booth, Senior Editor.