Week in review: A touchy business – Apple, HP and the Financial Times

Apple has dominated the headlines this week with the company's keynote address and product announcements, but the fruit company's rivals and partners have done their best to upset the apple cart.

The Eagle Has Landed

Apple may want people to be concentrating on its upcoming iOS 5 and new cloud service, iCloud, that hopefully won't suck as much as the last one. The really big news to come out of Cupertino though is the company's futuristic new headquarters, apparently designed with the environment and the latest architectural techniques in mind.

Steve Jobs himself describes the planned headquarters as resembling a 'spaceship'. That might sound impressive, but we at IT Pro are based out of a Death Star. Beat that. Nyah.

You can't touch this

HP's webOS-based tablet is finally getting a UK launch date and price. Well, sort of. While the pricing of the 16GB and 32GB WiFi-only models will match the corresponding iPad 2 models, availability is a bit shakier. The Americans will get it on 1 July, but HP can't decide if it will arrive in Blighty "a few days later" or "mid-July." Vagueness as a marketing strategy it will catch on, just you wait and see.

The funny pages

Apple is attempting to replicate its success at selling music and apps in the world of electronic magazines and newspapers with its new Newsstand store. Although the fruit company has dropped some of its more controversial pricing requirements, the FT pre-empted the announcement by striking out on its own.

The FT replicated its existing iOS app as an HTML5 web app that's accessible through a web page and can be saved to your home screen. It even supports offline reading at the cost of 50MB of storage space. It's still a little buggy though and doesn't feel quite as smooth and slick as the real app. Still, could this be the end of app stores?