What did I miss?

So, the tech news blog has been on holiday for the past couple of weeks. In that time, quite a bit has happened.

Clearly, the BIGGEST story in tech news during that time, was that I got to name the title of last week’s Windows Weekly podcast with Leo Laporte “bing is my back end“. Yeah, I’m a big fan of the show (thanks Leo.)

What else did I miss?

Well, Gmail was offline for a couple of hours. It seems this caused many people to believe this now means cloud computing is dead and that the ultra-reliable Gmail service is now a hunk of crap. (Dudes, it was down for 2 fricking hours!!)

Skype has been sold by eBay – interestingly, not sold ON eBay though.

Sony has decided to ship notebooks with the Chrome browser pre-installed. I love Chrome and think that with some decent add-ons, it could tempt me away from my beloved FireFox.

Microsoft are STILL trying to do something in the smartphone market, with the release of another version of Windows Mobile (6.5). It seems the marketplace is not desperate to dump their Symbian-based phones or iPhone’s for it just yet though.

iPhones have started to explode in people’s pockets (at least in France), though NOT according to Apple. Apple claims that the French iPhones it has seen with cracked screens, were all caused by external force.

YouTube has decided to unblock UK users from viewing ‘official’ music videos, after banning us from accessing them for the past 6-months. It seems a deal has been cut and everyone’s happy again. Great news for all lovers of sub-standard audio/video.