If you pay for the BBC License Fee, you'll want to get the optimum from the hundreds of pounds that (seemingly) get thrown down the drain with poor programming on a yearly basis, and one of the ways the majority of people will benefit from innovation is with mobile applications.

The BBC announced a brace of them at Mobile World Congress, one dealing with news on the go, and the other on sport in time for the World Cup later this year. Now, however, a trade body responsible for a bunch of national newspapers is calling for the BBC Trust to investigate the apps that will (supposedly) "strangle an important new market for news and information".

Can we please ask the Newspaper Publishers Association to pipe down? Mobile applications aren't out of the reach of any news organisation, and if they can't make their content useful or distinctive enough to differentiate it, then that's their look-out, don't try and call-foul on a concept that will only benefit users.

[BBC News] (via Pocket-Lint)

One of the brilliant pieces of web technology that has emerged in the past few years is that of TV catchup and streaming services, allowing users to view content from the major television channels whenever they wish.

A new player has entered the game today; SeeSaw, which hopes to become the go-to site for your catch-up needs, by pulling in content from BBC iPlayer, 4oD, DemandFive and more archive footage from all the networks.

It's a little light on content as it's still in beta, but it does seem to be doing an amazing job with what it does contain. Classic series' range from the brilliant "Footballers' Wives", to the sublime "Nathan Barley", as well as encompassing all sorts of more modern shows like "That Mitchell and Webb Look", "The Inbetweeners", "Hustle" and countless others.

All shows run a series of pre-roll ads to support the platform, and it doesn't look like there are ads in the middle of the shows at the moment.

In all it's a brilliantly pulled-off site that can only get better and better as more and more content is added.

[SeeSaw]

Facebook has just announced and rolled-out a new interface for the site that strips down everything bandwidth intensive across the social networking site, making it easy (and cheap) to use on mobiles that don't have a dedicated data plan.

The company's hoping that networks will provide access to Facebook Zero for free, as it isn't resource intensive, and should give users a taste for using the 400m users+ platform on their mobile devices, making it more likely they'd upgrade to the more fully-featured offering available on more expensive handsets and tariffs.

They also released stats (in this video) that show 100m people actively use the mobile offerings at the moment, and 200m have used them at some stage in their time on the service.

At least they're making allowances for differing levels of network capability, having a more parred down service for mobile, similarly to what they offering Facebook Lite for desktop browsing.

[TechCrunch]

Orange has just announced that they're going to be carrying the latest Android toting handset from HTC, the sibling to their Google-branded unit the Nexus One; the Desire, on selected contracts from April.

The device, which packs; Android 2.1 (the same version as found in the aforementioned Nexus One), 3G+, a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, 5MP camera, A-GPS, 3.7 inch WVGA capacitive touchscreen and a bevy of other high-end smartphone features, will be available on all consumer and business plans.

It will also be offered for free on selected tariffs when it hits us in April. So, if you were waiting for the Nexus One to hit Vodafone at some point this quarter, your decision just got slightly muddier.

[Orange Newsroom] (Image)

Not being in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress does make reporting on it slightly harder for us, but we shall endeavor to bring you the biggest news from the show over the next few days.

First up, the Sony Ericsson X10 Mini and Mini Pro Android packing handsets. Essentially miniature versions of the yet-to-be-released X10 device announced last year, both pack 2.55" QVGA touchscreens, 5MP cameras, Android 1.6 running on 600 MHz Qualcomm chips.

The Pro also packs a slide out QWERTY that doesn't look to add too much bulk to the diminutive frame is sports.
Both handsets will be cropping up in Q2, and their size coupled with an expectation they might be cheaper than other high-end devices, should make them a sure-fire hit (maybe if they shoehorn Android 2.1 in there for good measure by launch time as well).

Expect more information on them closer to launch, but we've pasted more technical information on them after the jump.

The Winter Olympics are going to kick off later today in Vancouver, Canada, and with that Google has taken the wraps off its first doodle to celebrate the occasion.

It packs in the 5-rings emblem of IOC, a stadium, as well as the Olympic Torch we all know and love.

There haven't been a lot of special Google doodles in the past few weeks after the run on them at the end of last year, but it's nice to see one on their page for millions to see for an event that has garnered surprisingly little web coverage.

[Google]

Whilst we don't subscribe to the hype around Google's new social layer for Gmail, there are plenty of tech-minded users that do, so there's now a new trick to updating your status there as well.

If you use Ping.fm to send status updates out to Twitter, Facebook and 50 other social networks, you are able to update your Buzz through Gtalk. Simply enable Gtalk as a service on your Buzz account, and add it to Ping.fm, and you can easily add posts to the new service when you update your other networks.

Quite how popular Buzz will be is anyone's guess, but with the number of social media and tech sites integrating some kind of integration, it might be slightly more successful than Wave.

[Seesmic Blog]