The HTC Wildfire, which was announced last month, is now available to pre-order with Vodafone.

The handset is expected to be loosed on the public later on in June, and you’ll be able to pick it up with the phone itself free on tariffs from £20 per month.

It’s essentially a more budget minded version of the hit HTC Desire (which runs to £30 per month, if you want the phone for free that is).

The Wildfire comes with a 3.2 inch touchscreen, a 500MHz processor, 5 megapixel camera, an FM radio and wi-fi. It runs Android 2.1.

It also comes with integrated social networking features, and an app sharing system which allows users to recommend apps to their friends.

The Wildfire could well be a tempter for those who felt the Desire was too rich for their blood.

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HTC Wildfire spreads to Vodafone for pre-order

Bing has done a deal with Facebook, and now has near real-time updates from the social networking site integrated into its search engine.

With results from Twitter already fed through to the site (since last October, in fact), Microsoft has stitched a new arm onto its search engine called Bing Social (www.bing.com/social).

Bing Social combines the search results from both Twitter and Facebook streams.

This means you can hop on there and root around directly in Facebook fan page updates, and popular shared links from users in aggregate form.

In other words, while fan page data might be shovelled about freely, popular personal updates will only be published on Bing in aggregate form, and only from Facebook users who have set their content to be shared with everyone.

This is a bow to the mighty privacy Gods, in other words. Or perhaps more of a nod.

Microsoft also noted, on the Bing Community page: “We’re [also] introducing a re-designed homepage that shows improved trending topics derived from both Twitter and Facebook data.”

“For each trending topic, we also show information about why it’s trending, a snippet of results from our social corpus, followed by query refiners on the bottom.”

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Bing gets Social with Facebook

Just when things appeared to be going fine between Virgin Media and BSkyB, it looks as if the cable TV provider is not too pleased with the deal struck by the media regulator Ofcom over the wholesale price of the satellite TV provider’s premium sports content.

In fact Virgin Media is appealing against the regulator’s ruling, because Ofcom has failed to cover the prices charged by BSkyB when the sports channels are sold in a bundle with other premium channels, such as the film channels.

It was less than a week ago when Virgin Media sold its TV channels to BSkyB and yet the broadcaster’s attention to details is still dominating the way in which the company gets on with rivals and the authorities.

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Virgin Media complains about Ofcom Sky Sports ruling

The UK-based set top box maker is indicating that it will be including wi-fi in its next generation of set top boxes, following a deal will the wi-fi alliance.

In a company announcement, it was said that Pace will be behind the development of this technology within the set top box and connected television sector.

Of course a new Pace wi-fi set top box is nothing new, Apple TV is currently using it and so are some television manufacturers, but the new Pace set top box, will be capable of transferring content by using the 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz radio waves through a single super fast connection gateway.

This will work out equal to the 8012.11 a, b, g and n transmissions.

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Pace adds wi-fi into STB

The employees of the ITV licence holder in Scotland, STV, are reported as being extremely worried about their future following the government’s decision to scrap the proposed replacement for regional programming and news coverage.

There were plans in place to provide news and regional programming through the Independently Funded News Consortium (IFNC) schemes, which would have received money from the TV Licence.

However, the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, pulled the plug on the plan in favour of spending the cash on rolling out superfast broadband.

In Scotland, the Scottish News Consortium (SNC) was due to welcome 120 members of staff from STV.

Now that the scheme has gone, the future does not look too good for these workers.

With STV now being held to its public service broadcasting obligations, the future is unclear.

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STV staff uncertain about future