Network and Internet Technologies

Newest Apple version of Microsoft's classic desktop suite includes collaboration tools, .PST file support, and Outlook. Microsoft on Thursday took the wraps off its forthcoming Office for Mac 2011 desktop suite. The software—not surprisingly, given the sudden ubiquity of sites like Facebook and Twitter—is big on collaboration and social networking tools. "Recently, you've asked for better ways to work with colleagues and friends anywhere, anytime, across platforms," said Microsoft. With that in mind, Mac Office 2011 features a number of new co-authoring tools that allow users in multiple locations to view and collaborate on the same file, whether it's in Word, PowerPoint, or Excel. A feature called Presence Everywhere aims to further enhance the collaborative experience by providing real-time status updates on who is working on a file. "Co-authoring improves the processes of working together, removing the pain and frustration of multiple versions, lost edits,

RIM has rebooted its touchscreen range with the Storm 2 9520, featuring re-tooled clickable touchscreen technology and new, intuitive text input options. It's still going to be seen as RIM's attempt to rival the likes of the iPhone 3GS, Palm Pre and HTC Hero, but are the updates on the Storm 2 enough to fix the issues that were so widely condemned on the original Storm? The Storm 2 is the same size as the original, but 5g heavier. We'd have imagined this would have given it a weightier and premium feel, but in practice this isn't the case with the phone feeling a little too heavy in the hand. BlackBerry storm 2 However, it sits well in the palm, with minimal dexterity needed to shuffle up and down the screen and also hit the on/lock screen button on the top left-hand side, which is a crucial feature often missed by mobile designers. The Storm 2 is pretty button-packed around the edges, with a number of rubberised buttons (which are apparently manufactured this way to st

Google has created hype around its own phone to rival Apple with its iPhone - and it has better specs on nearly every feature with the Nexus One. But is it enough to sway public opinion? In an attempt to show itself as a mobile manufacturer in its own right, Google has released the Nexus One, a handset built by HTC but branded solely as a Google phone. Despite some well-publicised problems with customer support and keypad malfunctions - neither of which became an issue during our testing process - the Nexus One is actually a stellar smartphone, easily the match of its peers. Google nexus one Everyone likes to talk about the next 'iPhone killer' - in reality, Android OS phones are content with second place, beating competitors like Nokia, Palm, Windows Mobile and RIM's BlackBerry OS. With Android, the hardware is also advancing, especially in terms of the touchscreen and the camera. For those wondering if they should just jump on the iPhone bandwagon, there are still a few a

Virgin has revealed a new 'underwater plane' called the Necker Nymph, with guests on Necker Island in the British Virgin Islands now able to take a dive into the Caribbean for a mere $325,000. Necker is Virgin Group Chairman Richard Branson's own private island and as of 20 February, two guests and a pilot will be able to take a dive down and fly into the great unknown in the new Necker Nymph. The underwater plane uses downward pressure on its wings to effectively fly through the water for periods of up to two hours at a time, with the passengers getting a full 360-degree view out of the plane's open cockpit. Underwater flight Karen Hawkes, a rep from the Nymph's designers Hawkes Ocean Technologies, said: "Gliding on the water's surface like an aeroplane on a runway, one of the three pilots will operate the joystick to smoothly dive down." Passengers must be fully SCUBA trained, although we doubt that the added cost of that extra training will really b

f seemingly imminent plans by Apple to buy a small online music specialist from California go ahead, it could signal the end of music downloading as we know it. The apparently solid rumours that Jobs and co. are set to snap up Lala, a cloud-storage music website, suggests that Apple is either looking to add streaming music to iTunes or build something even more innovative. No offline tracks Lala's ability to make entire music collections available from the cloud obviates the need for users to keep downloaded copies offline on any of their own media, whether that's a portable player or a computer hard drive. Should iTunes eventually morph into a music library in the sky, as many observers are speculating, then both downloads and music copying could disappear. What's left? After all, when companies like Apple are merely selling the right to listen to music stored remotely on hardware with permission to access it, then there won't be a lot left to copy.

Some new technologies are little more than shiny toys, but others change your life. Some of them can even change the world, spawning entire new industries and making everyone slap their heads and go "duh! Why didn't we think of that?" The following 20 technologies range from the tiny to the shiny, but they've all got one thing in common: they've had, or will have, a massive impact. The Transistor Without the transistor, pretty much all the techno-toys we take for granted wouldn't exist - or if they did, they'd each be the size of Belgium. The basic building block of everything electronic, the transistor is widely credited to Bell Labs' William Shockley, who based his own research on findings by John Bardeen and Walter Brattain in 1947. The IBM PC The first IBM PC was powered by an Intel 8088 microprocessor, was the size of a portable typewriter and packed 16K of RAM. It cost $1,565. It might look horribly dated now, but if it weren't for this first