October
Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 finally got its hard launch this month, and the UK event featured a surprise appearance from comedian Stephen Fry, who is known for his love of Apple products. To the relief of many a neutral, WP7 seems like a respectable effort by Microsoft to redefine its mobile OS offering, but only time will tell if it can take back market share from Apple and Google.
The economic recovery continued in the tech sector, with bellwethers Intel, Google and Apple once more breaking revenue records. But while Apple especially was going from strength to strength, the PC market was slowing down, which many analysts seeing a link between the two phenomena.
HP had been pretty quiet since buying Palm, and with it its own mobile operating system, but six months after the acquisition we got sequels to webOS and the Palm Pre. Once more they looked like decent efforts, but HP has got a lot of competitors to account for if it hopes to be a major player in the smartphone market.
October was the month when the activities of whistle-blowing website Wikileaks really made their way into the mainstream, as a bunch of secret documents revealing some American activities during the Iraq war were published. Julian Assange - the head of Wikileaks - was apparently on the run even then, and by the end of the year had been arrested and released on bail in the UK.
