Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile and France Telcom’s Orange have announced Tuesday that they plan to merge the two mobile phone carriers, making them the largest carrier in the U.K. once combined. Currently T-Mobile and Orange are the 3rd and 4th largest mobile operations in Britain behind O2 and Vodafone. The merger would launch the combined companies into the number one spot with 28.4 million mobile phone users and a 37 percent market share, leaving O2 trailing with 27 percent and Vodafone 3rd with 25 percent of the mobile market in Britain.

The merger involves plans to maintain their own distinct brands for the first year and a half and then agree on one common brand which could be one of the two existing or something completely new. The two companies will also start streamlining their operations by eliminating overlapping administration, retail stores and base stations with lay-offs likely in the near future.

The Monster Beats by Dr. Dre line has several different sets of headphones that are not cheap and are over ear headphones that are very large. Most people, especially the ladies, don’t really want huge headphones to listen to their music with.

Monster has announced its first Artist edition headphones in the Beats line with a set called Heartbeats by Lady Gaga. The headphones meet the strict audio quality requirements of Dr. Dre and monster while being made to a more refined design standard by Gaga.

Monster may be best known for its insanely expensive cable solution for home theater and car audio. The company also offers other expensive wares like headphones and power supplies for home theater.

Monster announced its latest addition to the Beats by Dr. Dre line called the Beats Solo headphones. The headphones will sell for $219.95 and are considered to be the entry-level headphones to the Beats line. Both black and white colors will be offered.

The HitchSafe Key Vault Hitch Safe lets you store valuables in your Trailer Hitch, where no one will expect valuables. Basically, it puts a combination locked safe into your car or truck’s trailer hitch. Maybe you want to keep a spare set of keys in there, or some candy, or whatever.

It’s easy to install and made of sturdy solid heavy-gauge metal with a heavy duty rubber dust cover. It’s secure thanks to a four digit combination lock and you can set it to your own combination. The HitchSafe is large enough to store up to 9 spare keys even credit cards and your driver’s license if you like.

The Mac Vs. PC war shows no signs of slowing down. No matter which side you are on, chances are you have a friend on the opposing team. What better way to wage this war than with a friendly game of chess? Hey, if you lose, you can always take a sledgehammer to your buddies Zune/ipod.

Designer Adam Frederick created this chessboard design. Which side do you think would win? No offense to Adam, but I think the pieces need a little more thought put into them. The PC side isn’t nearly clunky enough and if you buy this set, the Mac side should cost you a fortune before you can even play.

If you are in the market for a powerful desktop PC, look no further. DosPara just dropped another powerful desktop PC on the Japanese market. The Prime A Galleria PXR2. Not much to look at, but it’s what’s under the hood that counts.

This beast is powered by a 3.4GHz AMD Phenom II X4 965 processor and features two 1GB ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics cards, 4GB of DDR3 SDRAM (PC3-10600), an Intel X25-M 80GB MLSSD, a 1TB of SATA II HDD, DVD Super Multi drive and Windows Vista Home Premium OS. The Prime A Galleria PXR2 is available in Japan right now for about $2,148.

Who knew that LG was crushing so hard on Nintendo’s Wii? They have it bad for Nintendo’s console. So bad that it is using the Wiimote concept for its new series of TVs called the Magic Motion Remote Control. It features both the typical channel and volume buttons and can be pointed at the TV to control on-screen menus and games. Probably nothing as cool as Mario Kart.

It also has the ability to place a cursor on-screen which can then be manipulated by movements like a flicking of your wrist. The remote goes on sale next year but LG is undecided as to whether it will offer it as an optional extra, or bundle it with its high-end TVs.

Check out this Toshiba/Ducati love child. We’ll leave it up to you as to whether it’s awesome or disastrous. The Toshiba U500 Ducati laptop does look good, we have to give it props there. It features an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4570 graphics card, along with a Core 2 Duo 8700 processor and 4GB of RAM. Looks like it might also run on Windows 7.

Nothing on a release date yet though and we don’t have a price, but you can expect it to be very expensive since it has two big time brand names on it.

Monopoly has so many incarnations at this point that you may think they can’t do anything new. Turns out they have some tricks up their sleeve. Monopoly is about to go online. On September 9, Hasbro will launch Monopoly City Streets, which is a live, worldwide version of the popular game.

Players get $3 million to start and will be able to put nearly any kind of building anywhere they want, thanks to Google Maps. You want a football stadium in the the middle of town, where it doesn’t belong? Your wish is granted. Could be a lot of fun.

Asus just launched its new Designo MS series, which is a line of ultra-slim monitors How slim? How about 0.64″? They are available in five diagonal sizes: 20, 21.5, 22, 23 and 23.6 inches. Asus says that the design comes from binary numbers and various design elements that use 0′s and 1′s.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t see it. Anyhow, this series does look sexy and sleek though and supposedly they use 40% less energy than other monitors. You can Expect 1080p resolution, 50000:1 contrast, 2mn response time and HDMI.

Here’s an interesting eBook from Asus dubbed the eee-Book, sporting two color displays that lets you flip the pages like you would on a real book. Think of it as a large Nintendo DS on it’s side. You can also browse the web on one of the displays, presumably while reading on the other.

It connects using 3G or Wifi, comes with a memory card slot and supports Skype audio/video conferencing. The price is a really nice $165. Look out Kindle! That’s about all the info we have right now, but we like what we see.

Well, it took awhile, but Apple has finally approved the C64 emulator for the iPhone. It’s the first officially-available emulator and the first app that runs code. That code is old, but still. It was the code that was the problem, due to a clause in the iPhone 2.0 SDK that prevented apps from containing their own executable codes.

But iPhone 3.0 contains a new feature for in-app purchases that the C64 emulator will take advantage of to let users purchase additional games. You can get the app now with five games for only $4.99.

There are more iPod docks on the market than you can shake a stick at. Not sure why you would do such a thing, but it’s true. But Elonex has something new in iPod docks. Something actually innovative. The iGAME dock may not be sexy, but it can handle music, videos, podcasts and video podcasts in the usual way. But what sets it apart is that it’s primarily a game console, designed to use Apple’s newest players. And yes, it owes much to the Wii.

The price is only £79 and games are priced at only a few pounds. They are aiming to have iGAME FAMILY being popular for Christmas of 2009.

Power strips are convenient. Sadly, they are also ugly, putting all of your plugs in a row, with cords trailing everywhere. The Power Bridge is one of the best solutions we’ve seen, flipping the power strip over to keep your cords neatly tucked away.

It’s from designer Hyuk Jae Chang and it’s neat enough to even have on your desk. All of the wires come out in one spot, which you can turn to face any direction and a pivoting multi-directional power cord on the Bridge itself makes sure that all wires line up.

Pocket camcorders keep getting smaller, even when you think they can’t shrink anymore. Aiptek’s latest pocket camcorder is one of the smallest we’ve seen yet that can shoot HD video. It also sports a 1.1-inch OLED screen on the back so you can preview your footage.

Some other features include the ability to shoot video at 720p30 and take 5 megapixel stills, with 4GB of internal memory, which will hold about two hours of footage. If you are into YouTube, you can upload straight from the camera’s Windows-only software, or pump it out to your TV through the HDMI port.