Week in Review: BlackBerry in the eye of the 'Storm'

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Research in Motion (RIM) chose well when it named its new handset ‘Storm’ judging by the good headlines it is making.

Vodafone and RIM’s little BlackBerry baby is going to “storm” into the shops next Friday. The new touchscreen handset is looking like it will fight head to head with the iPhone this Christmas in the competition to win the hearts and minds of both consumers and business users.

We have a sneak preview and video of the device here.

The National ID Card scheme is now getting into full swing, with Manchester and London City Airports signing up airport workers for the first initial 18-month period. There’s also an increasing likelihood that we will see businesses like Post offices ‘fingerprinting’ customers in ‘biometric enrollment centres’.

It’s been a long and rocky road, but UK ID cards are now very close to becoming a reality.

What’s next for Yahoo?. After so much hoo-ha with the rejection of the Microsoft deal, Google has pulled its hand out of the fire as it decides opposition from antitrust regulators is simply too much trouble. With Microsoft apparently walking away from any future deal, Jerry Yang and Yahoo are running out of options.

However it's good news for World War II codebreaking institution Bletchley Park, as English Heritage hands the home of Colossus (the first programmable computer) a £330,000 grant. For modern day computing the site has major historical value as it was where the work of genius Alan Turing and his team broke the code of the infamous German Enigma machine.

Other stories which stood out for IT PRO this week?

Understandably there was definite concern with news that Wi-Fi WPA encryption had been cracked – in around 15 minutes.

Finally, new technology from SanDisk could pave the way for mainstream adoption of solid state disks (SSDs), which could make them 100x faster than current drives.

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