Panasonic has revealed its new smartphone for the European market. It follows the company’s announcement in December that it was working towards the launch of a dustproof and waterproof Europe-focussed smartphone in March 2012.

The new Panasonic ELUGA - the name comes from ELegant User-oriented GAteway - is an Android smartphone that meets IP57 for dust and water resistance.

We don’t have 4G LTE in the UK yet - but it looks as though LTE is going to be one of the biggest themes at this year’s Mobile World Congress.

ZTE Corporation has announced plans to launch two new LTE handsets at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week. Both will run Android v4.0.

With Mobile World Congress just a week away, LG has announced a new 4G LTE device that’ll be making its debut there.

It’s called the Optimus Vu: (yes, the colon is part of the name) and has a 5-inch 1024x768 screen with a 4:3 ratio, giving it a similar format to an ebook reader.

Mark Bridge writes:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. So said Sir Arthur C Clarke.

Last week’s magic was supplied by imaging company Scalado, which announced a new product called ‘Remove’. The clue’s in the name: it can automatically remove unwanted people from photos taken on a mobile phone. Expect to see it on a handset near you before too long.

Google and a number of other online businesses have been criticised after taking advantage of ‘cookies’ that apparently bypassed the security settings in the Safari web browser used by Apple computers and iPhones.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the specially-designed web code enabled users to be ‘tracked’ as they visited different web sites despite this type of monitoring being blocked as a default setting on the browser.