Week in Review: Steve Jobs returns

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All eyes were on Apple again this week as the company held another of its ‘special events’. September is generally iPod refresh month, and as ever, there was little surprise about the content, with camera equipped iPods and a refreshed iTunes 9 the mainstay of the announcements. However, headlines were assured as Steve Jobs returned to the stage, making it clear he was back in charge.

For the gadgeteers, the most significant announcement was arguably the cutely named Palm Pixi, which is technically the follow up to the Palm Pre – even though the Pre is yet to be released in the UK.

And speaking of former great mobile companies trying to resuscitate itself, Motorola announced the Google Android powered Cliq, though when it arrives over here, it will be known as the Dext. No, we’re not sure why either.

Poor T-Mobile – in terms of the UK mobile networks it’s always been the runt of the litter, even back when it was One2One. It’s name has been bandied about for sale for some time, but it was Orange that was the surprise taker. It will take 18 months to complete the merger, but it will create the largest mobile network in the UK, overtaking O2 and Vodafone.

Everyone also got excited this week about the arrival of Spotify on the iPhone, following the surprise that Apple had approved the app that some say could rival iTunes itself for music. The app itself is slick, offering offline access to music as well as streaming, but the iPhone app store reviews range from the 5-star ‘awesome’ to 1-star, ‘awful’, depending on user’s reactions to the £10 a month subscription fee.

If you’re looking to refresh your desktops then Intel will be happy as it’s just released its high-end Lynnfield chips for desktops and servers, but AMD would rather not talk about processors at all anymore, which does sound like its gone off to sulk.

Its aim with its Vision platform, is to explain what its machines can do, rather than bamboozle with specs, but we do wonder how effective it will be in practice.

Finally, Microsoft has got its digital knickers in a twist over Google’s book digitising project – calling the settlement that enables Google to create a massive library of digital books “an unprecedented misuse of the judicial system”. The issue's also been up for debate in the EU. We imagine the book about this should make for a good read.

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