New video! LG Prada Phone 3.0 sets its sights on the ‘it’ crowd It’s round three for LG’s Prada Phone, which is bound to appeal to the fashion-loving masses – but is it any good? With Prada stamped onto its back panel, the LG Prada Phone 3.0 will no doubt appeal to the ‘it’ crowd – but what about discerning smartphone lovers? It does everything you’d expect from a reasonably high-end smartphone, but is it good enough to make the grade?...

New video! Stuff meets Industrial Light & Magic’s special effects wizards Wham! Bam! Boom! Sploosh! We head over to San Francisco to meet the CGI maestros behind Battleship’s special effects Since George Lucas created Industrial Light & Magic in 1975, the visual effects house has pioneered new special effects tech, using CGI to conjure up gigantic spaceships out of a photo-realistic sea in Battleship, and emotive performances out of motion-captured characters such as the Hulk in Avengers Assemble....

Next Big Thing – LG flexible ereader displays Plastic ebook displays that bend, can bounce back from drops and even survive hammer blows are the future – and it’s coming this month LG doesn’t make those screens, does it? Beneath Mount LG in the deep, lava-lined halls of the LG dungeon of development, secret works of magic have been enacted to create a display like no other. And now the 1024×768 pixel, flexible plastic Electronic Paper Display (EPD) has been unveiled and will be surfacing as soon as next month....

Next Big Thing – underwater hotels It looks like a Bond villain’s headquarters, but you don’t need a PhD in Evil to stay at this underwater hotel Dr Evil’s built a new lair? It sure looks that way – and the Water Discus is certainly a stronghold, built to withstand a tsunami. But it’s actually a hotel, half submerged up to 10m beneath the Arabian Gulf, with the other half floating above the ocean....

Nuance’s VoCon Music Premium could kit Siri out with Gracenote’s music database Think Siri is smart now? Just wait a little longer and Apple’s Virtual Assistant could be able to play you almost any music you can think of Nuance, the company responsible for developing Apple’s Siri personal assistant hasannounceda partnership with Gracenote, giving it access to a gargantuan database of music, films, videos and TV shows. The partnership will first bear fruit in the form of VoCon Music Premium, a service which will “combine Nuance’s voice and language understanding technologies with Gracenote’s MediaVOCS database of phonetic transcriptions for artists and albums....

Official Spotify iPad app leaked in Instagram snap Instagram photo purportedly shows off streaming music app for Apple’s slate in all its beta version glory We loveSpotify, but the lack of an iPad app is a major drawback (yeah, we know you can use the iPhone app but it looks awful on a 10-inch screen). Spotify’s website says that a version of the app for Apple’s slate is “planned” – but it seems development may be a little more advanced than it’s been letting on....

Only 900 Bat-fans will get Nokia’s The Dark Knight Rises Lumia 900 It’s the Bat-phone! Nokia spills the beans on its Batman-themed limited edition Lumia 900 Phones 4Uhas spilled further details on its Batman-themed Lumia 900, tying in with the forthcoming release ofThe Dark Knight Rises. It looks like you’ll have to move as quickly as the Caped Crusader to get your hands on one of these Bat-Phones – there will only be 900 released....