Week in Review

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This week HP and RIM joined hands, Virgin looks to speed up the UK’s sluggish broadband and the release candidate of Windows 7 is made available to the public.

With Monday being a Bank Holiday, we were expecting a slow start to the week, but clearly no one told HP and RIM that the UK was taking a long weekend.

News broke that the two companies had cosied up with a plan to help businesses, "weave mobility into their daily operations from innovative new services in the cloud to managed mobile services for the enterprise."

It looks as though HP's corporate strength will help boost RIM in terms of interoperability and new applications, but it's probably not good news for Apple, who would love to see its iPhone enjoy more widespread adoption in the enterprise.

RIM wasn't letting up either, with confirmation that it's got a successor to the Blackberry Storm in the pipeline.

RIM's chief exec even claimed that the Storm has gone down like one with the public, despite the mixed reviews. It seems that even the power of Stephen Fry's dismissive Twitter posts wasn't enough to dampen the public's love of all things touch.

Virgin started to get things going in the super-fast broadband stakes by announcing a limited trial of speeds of up to 200Mbps. The company has asked the lucky trialists to provide feedback on the service so it can gauge how it will be used. Presumably this will be more enlightening than, "watched iPlayer in HD no skipping". This is a long way from what most UK punters are currently getting, though a slow handclap at the news that the UK's average speed is now up to 4Mbps.

What we're most excited about at IT PRO this week though, (well OK, just me), is the release of the release candidate of Windows 7. It's perhaps a little geeky, but it's made using a PC that bit more fun again and I'm sure that this is going to make Apple have to work a lot harder get people to switch'. The new release is free to download and to use for up to a year though be wary that it will start to nag you a full three months before that year is up.

Rumours also surfaced this week that T-Mobile UK would have to merge to survive, following poor first quarter results. The most likely candidate to join with would be 3, with whom it already has network partnership arrangements. But all bets are off and it could end up with Orange.

Will T-Mobile go the way of its former guise of One2One and disappear from the UK?

Benny Har-Even
Benny Har-Even

Benny Har-Even is a twenty-year stalwart of technology journalism who is passionate about all areas of the industry, but telecoms and mobile and home entertainment are among his chief interests. He has written for many of the leading tech publications in the UK, such as PC Pro and Wired, and previously held the position of technology editor at ITPro before regularly contributing as a freelancer.

Known affectionately as a ‘geek’ to his friends, his passion has seen him land opportunities to speak about technology on BBC television broadcasts, as well as a number of speaking engagements at industry events.