2007: A year in review, October

Exclusives from Sony and Apple, Google enjoys yet another bumper month; and the first ever tailor made Skype mobile phone

30 December 2007 11:00 GMT / By Katie Scott

We started October with exclusive news from Sony.

The company told Pocket-lint that it had not only decided to reduce the price of its 60GB console to £349 but also was to create a 40GB version priced at £299 to go up against the Xbox 360 Elite.

A day later, the news broke elsewhere.

The new PS3 console still featured a Blu-ray drive as standard, but also boasted a 40GB hard drive, Wi-Fi connectivity and a SIXAXIS controller, (but lost two of its four USB slots and the memory card reader).

Meanwhile, Google's stock price went over $600 for the first time.

The search engine company's shares traded as high as $610.26 before falling back to $609.62, a gain of $15.57, or 2.6%.

The company was claimed to have a market value of $187 billion - worth more Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Coca-Cola Co., Hewlett-Packard Co and IBM Corp.

Next up, the cat and mouse game between Apple and iPhone hackers got a little more interesting.

The team from iPhoneSimFree, the for-profit group offering iPhone unlocks, launched its 1.1.1 unlock, offering customers an easy way to "unbrick" 1.1.1 updated phones.

And we also reported that the iPod touch had been hacked.

Although the solution was not available for general consumer consumption, the hackers managed to get Mail, Maps, and other third party apps running on their jailbreaked touchs.

Days later, Apple responded by releasing a software development kit for the iPhone that will also work for the iPod touch.

The SDK will arrive in February.

Mid-October, we had another exclusive with news that Apple was to cut the price of its iTunes DRM-free, higher quality offerings, selling tracks for 79p.

Online reports suggested there will be a reduction in the price of all iTunes Plus tracks from 99p to 79p and albums from £9.99 to £7.99.

These price cuts were suggested to be due to the launch of Amazon.com's MP3 store that offers DRM-free downloads for around the 89 cent mark.

The official announcement came a day later with news also that Apple had expanded its iTunes Plus offering to over two million tracks.

And October ended with an addition to the range of Skype handsets on the market.

The 3 Skypephone is a "fully-featured" 3G internet phone with Skype built-in. In addition to Skype calls, the phone makes conventional calls and can be used to access 3's range of other internet services.

This was the first time an operator had offered a mass market device which is tailor-made for free calling over the Internet from a mobile.

Non-phone related functionality included a 2-megapixel camera and an MP3 player complete with bundled 256MB memory card.

Video calling and Skype-Out functionality are promised in 2008.

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