Week in Review: IDF fever and Government IT

San Francisco's Intel Developer ForumYou won't find better coverage of Intel's technology gathering this week thanks to Maggie Holland and our team on the ground. Some big stories have come out from the conference, but probably the most important was about Intel's new power saving i7 chip based on Nehalem next-generation architecture the future replacement for Intel's current Core 2 Duo chips. Intel also revealed plans for the future replacement for the low-cost Atom chip , and we revealed its new Solid State Drive (SSD) line-up.

We also looked at Intel's future plans when it came to innovation, cancer research, artificial intelligence and of course robots. We also revealed a new touch screen and tablet functionality for its new generation of low-cost Classmate portable PCs.

Prisoner details lost on unencrypted memory stickSimply unbelievable. A contractor working for the Home Office manages to lose a USB stick which contains personal details of all the prisoners in the UK, as well as details of ex-offenders, including in some cases home addresses. It has happened before and is likely to happen again, but to lose that amount of data on an unencrypted data USB stick? That's new almost comedy.

Face scanning border tech tested at Manchester AirportManchester will test new technology which the Government hopes will improve security and quicken immigration control times. Specially-built gates will scan passenger faces and compare them to photographs stored digitally on biometric passports. Unlike some government schemes (we're looking at you NHS IT ), "e-borders'', an electronic border system, seems to be working reasonably well as we have seen with the biometric fingerprint system.

HP shrugs off downturn HP looks to be doing reasonably well considering the doom and gloom of the current world economic situation. The vendor posted better than expected global results, with software and personal systems the best performing groups. Could the IT sector be showing more resilience than we expected? IT PRO has previously interviewed HP's Eric Cador about why he thought his company is beating market trends.

Palm boosts pro credentialsSmartphone maker Palm has released the Treo Pro aimed at the business market a response to recent products released by Apple, BlackBerry, and Nokia. Question is is it good enough to compete with some very serious competition?