Google  launched its hotly-anticipated new mobile phone Tuesday in its most direct challenge yet to Apple's hugely popular iPhone.

The Nexus One, which boasts a highly-developed touch screen and other enhancements, is due to be unveiled at Google's headquarters in Silicon Valley.

Precise details of the launch – including final prices and information on when it will go on sale in Britain – are still unconfirmed, though speculation is rife that it will be priced at $530 (£328).

Whether you're a frequent flyer or you just take your notebook from room to room at home, your portable gets subjected to a lot more punishment than desktops do. With this in mind, notebook manufacturers construct their systems to stand up to everything from violent jostling to occasional spills.

Despite their relatively hearty constitutions, laptops are often quick to show signs of wear and tear--and not just on the outside. Any one of these issues can cost you time and money in not just lost productivity, but on tech support calls and shipping labels as well. Thankfully, your notebook's ailments can often be cured with a quick fix. To pinpoint the most common problems, we picked the brains of senior technical-support officials at Alienware, Dell, Lenovo, and Toshiba. And we've provided solutions for getting your laptop back up and running with minimal effort.

Laptops tend to lose their charm quickly when you’re constantly looking for the nearest power outlet to charge up.  How do you keep your battery going for as long as possible?  Here are 15 easy ways to do so.

1. Defrag regularly -  The faster your hard drive does its work – less demand you are going to put on the hard drive and your battery.  Make your hard drive as efficient as possible by defragging it regularly. (but not while it’s on battery of course!) Mac OSX is better built to handle fragmentation so it may not be very applicable for Apple systems.

For the ten-year span that started in 2000, turbulence was the name of the game in high tech. Fortunes were made and lost, everyday users took control of the reins, and technology-watching became a spectator sport. It was a chaotic time, but it was seldom dull. Here, then, is a look at the decade that was: the highlights and lowlights, the booms and busts, the fizzles and sizzles.

1. Y2K Fizzles: 2000 started not with a bang but with a whimper. Dire predictions of computer systems going haywire, mass power outages, travel disruptions, and maybe even a run on squirrel jerky simply didn't happen, as the Year 2000 Problem turned out to be more hiccup than heartbreak. Did all the Y2K-bug-squishing task forces save us from disaster? Or was the whole affair not quite as dire as advertised? We may never know for sure. So let's raise a glass and offer a New Year's toast to one of life's eternal mysteries.

Google's Chrome accounts only for about 4 percent of browser usage worldwide, but in 2009, it exerted outsized influence.

Google launched the open-source browser in 2008, prompting many to ask why anyone needed another after Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Mozilla's Firefox, and Apple's Safari. But over the course of 2009, Google answered that question: with Chrome, the company wants not just to speed up the Web but to rebuild its foundations.

Chrome started out as one of Google's efforts to accelerate the Web--launching faster, loading pages faster, and running Web-based JavaScript programs faster. Google's argument: a faster Web experience means people will spend more time online, do more things, and, naturally, click more Google search ads.

When Google asked what you liked and disliked about their new real-time communication application, you unquestionably said that you wanted more invites to share with friends and family. Problem solved!

Today Google decided to play Santa with Wave invites. It has just doled out significantly more invites to existing users.

In conjunction with the invite rollout, Google is also hinting that they’ll soon reach the 1 million user mark. The title of their post suggestively hints that “a million stamps” have been licked, which we take to mean that they’ve now opened up Google Wave to a million users.

Facebook recently has made headlines for the ways in which it is calling attention to the challenges of online safety, particularly with respect to social networks. On Monday, Facebook launched a Safety Advisory Council -- one of a number of ways the social networking site is trying to batten down the hatches and provide a safer online environment.

- Facebook's Safety Advisory Board comprises five leading Internet safety organizations from North America and Europe that will advise Facebook on online safety policy. The members of the Safety Advisory Board are Childnet International, The Family Online Safety Institute, Common Sense Media, ConnectSafely and WiredSafety. One of the council's first projects will be to overhaul the safety information at Facebook's Help Center with the goal of providing more comprehensive resources and including content that's specifically tailored to the needs of parents, teachers and teens.

- Facebook is active in MTV's A Thin Line campaign, aimed at helping teenagers stop the spread of digital abuse. MTV's A Thin Line campaign debuted this month and urges Internet users, especially young people, to "draw the line" line between digital use and digital abuse.

Google is obsessed with speed and efficiency. What other company would care so much about efficiency that they would create a super-minimalist homepage, build their own web-centric operating system, and also revamp its search algorithms?

Now Google is bringing its obsession with speed to the masses by launching a new tool to help website owners improve the speed and loading time of their website. Google Site Performance, now available as part of Webmaster Tools Labs, analyzes your website and provides data on the average load time, graphs out how your site has improved or slowed down over time, generates reports on specific pages, and most of all, offers suggestions for speeding up your website.

The last piece is the most important. Google derives revenue from advertising, and as we’ve explained before, the more you’re on the web, the better for Google. Slow loading pages however delay you from viewing or clicking on a Google ad, affecting its revenues.