Technofile:The two big gadget shows this week were the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and Macworld in San Francisco. Both ran at the same time, making it a Mac versus Microsoft/everyone else week. Who won?
Well, if I mention that Apple finally released a product that tech geeks have been talking about for four solid years, I think you can guess.
At the start of the week, it looked like it was round one to Microsoft, which made a number of announcements, perhaps the main one being an internet TV version of its Xbox 360 games console.
The download service will launch initially in the US using the Xbox 360 and its Microsoft TV IPTV Edition software. Not to be outdone, Sony came out with a new internet video system, the Bravia Internet Video Link, which will allow most of its new televisions to access free internet video content.
The drawback with the Microsoft news? You can't buy this in a store as it will only be offered by telcos and cable firms which deploy TV services based on the Microsoft TV IPTV Edition software platform.
Very boring.
Instead, Bill Gates attempted to excite us with news of the Windows Home Server. This is a software product aimed at families who are by now knee-deep in digital photos, video and music, and who have no idea how they are going to store and organise all this stuff. Home Server will allow people to connect their home computers, digital devices and printers.
Microsoft launched it with Hewlett-Packard (HP), which plans to release the HP MediaSmart Server, powered by Windows Home Server.
And perhaps stung by the unseemly stampede amongst car makers to incorporate iPod interfaces into their newer cars, Gates also announced a partnership between Microsoft and Ford called Sync, which will enable you to connect your (non-Apple) digital devices to your car (mobile phones, Microsoft Zune MP3 player, you get the idea).
However, as we all know by now, the real buzz was a long drive up the road in San Francisco, where most of the world's press had gathered to hear Apple's Steve Jobs unveil its latest secret project. The rumour was that Apple would launch a combined iPod and mobile phone. And for once, it was true. The iPhone is a dazzling smartphone, with a radical design aesthetic: almost no buttons, but a sinuous touchscreen capable of being navigated with one or two fingers.
It runs Apple's grown-up OS X operating system and syncs with iTunes just like the iPod, along with the rest of the data on a Mac computer.
Jobs also unveiled more details about the company's AppleTV 40 gigabyte device which will allows users to stream movies, music, photos, podcasts and TV shows to their TV or Hi Fi.
However, frankly by this stage, no one cared, since the demo of the iPhone was really quite impressive, even for hard-bitten technology journalists.
