By Gary Johnson-Laird

It's a big week for technology this week, on Monday Apple announcedsome interesting stuff at the World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) , Tuesdaysaw Sony and Microsoft take to the floor at the Electronic Entertainment Expo(E3) and then Nintendo took the floor on Wednesday.

Firstly Apple announced their new operating system for macs,this one is called Lion, apparently it has 250 new features and its available for just $29.99 (which will probably be £29.99 for us) exclusively from Apple'sApp Store.

They then announced anew online backup service called iCloud. All your apple devices areautomatically backup up and stored to iCloud and any document changes areautomatically pushed onto your other devices too, this will come in handy forsharing your photos between devices. iTunes match will also be used by iCloudto share your music between all your devices, including files not purchased fromiTunes.

Finally they announced IOS 5, the newest operating system for iPhones and iPads. They have packed some interesting new feature into thistime. The annoying POP UP notifications have now been collected into anotification centre, a small bar underneath the time bar shows how manynotifications you have, very similar to Android phones. iMessage is a new appthat lets you send texts, photos , videos or contact info to other IOS 5 usersfor free, this will be integrated into the existing messages app. Sounds verysimilar to RIM's Blackberry messenger. Twitter has been integrated into severalthings such as the camera app, allowing users to keep their followers informedquicker, hmm sounds pretty much the same as the Windows 7 phones. Another great feature; users can finallyupdate their devices over the air, eliminating the need to find the USB cable everytime you want to add a song to your device. A few other improvements include: a camera button on the lock screen, using the+ volume button to take pictures when using the camera and customisablevibration alerts.

No new iPhone model announced this year, guess the rumourswere true that its being delayed till September to boost sales for Christmas.

At E3 microsoft showed off some new games for its Kinectsensor, launched last year, looks like they are trying to encourage hardcoregamers to buy it by including functionality in games such as mass effect 3 andFable: the journey. Some nice games being showed off such as Gears of war 3 ,Halo 4 and Bioshock Infinite, exciting stuff but no new hardware fromMicrosoft, unless you count their steering wheel peripheral.

Sony took the opportunity to apologise for their recentsecurity intrusions and to showcase their new portable console that wasannounced back in January, originally named PlayStation NGP, the PlayStationVita (which is latin for life) is going head to head with the Nintendo 3DS, the3DS isn't doing so well at the moment so Sony have a good chance to win theportable console race. PS Vita boasts an impressive 5 inch touchscreen display,with 2 analogue sticks, a D-pad, the usual 4 Sony Buttons, 2 shoulder buttons,a playstation button, start and select buttons and a touchpad on the back. And ifthat wasn't enough it also has a front camera, a rear camera, SIX-AXIS motionsensor, GPS, Wi-Fi , Bluetooth and 3G. Sony have really crammed a lot into thisconsole, which is made even more impressive by its size. Games are going to bedistributed on NVG cards, which are basically flash memory cards, and will comein 2 sizes; 2GB and 4GB.

Nintendo finally unveiled to the public its new console,named the Wii U. Rumours have been floating around about this console formonths and it seems like most of them were true. The new Wii has finally caughtup to the other main consoles by displaying games in 1080p HD. It also features a new controller that has atouchscreen display, front facing camera, microphone as well as the usualcollection of buttons. The controller can actually be used as a full display ifthere are no TVs handy. This controller has obviously been designed to emulatetablet devices, such as the iPad, that have become very popular recently. TheWii remote, nunchuck, classic controller and the balance board will be compatiblewith the Wii U as well. The games will be distributed on "proprietaryhigh-density optical discs" which will be able to hold 25GBs of data,which is about 3 times the size of the current discs used. Expect a releasedate somewhere after April 2012. This should give Sony and Microsoft anincentive to rush their new consoles, hopefully we will be seeing them at next year'sE3 with release dates all before Christmas 2012. Suppose I better start savingup.