The search giant has also announced that MySpace updates will also be included in its results to add more real-time capabilities. The enterprise is also getting in on the act, with salesforce.com unveiling Chatter, a real-time collaboration platform.

The app works in the background while the user browses the site and informs them if they can get the item cheaper at another site. A direct link to the cheaper item is offered via a drop-down menu bar that appears at the top of the browser window.

Landy says that this is much more efficient than traditional price comparison sites such as kelkoo.co.uk and pricerunner.co.uk as they rely on feeds that retailers themselves update. This means that prices can often be out of date when they are published. Because InvisibleHand is real-time it can also notify users of one-day sales and other promotions, which many other price comparison sites cannot.

InvisibleHand is currently available as an add-on for Firefox and Google Chrome and has been downloaded nearly 150,000 times since its release towards the end of 2009. It can also integrate with Google searches, so searching for an item you're thinking of buying will automatically bring up a real-time price guide.

InvisibleHand's website says that it has so far saved consumers £6.7m, with an average saving of £14.85. The company makes money by taking a slice of each successful transaction.

After UK and US launches, InvisibleHand recently launched in Germany and plans more world wide releases this year. An add-on for Microsoft's Internet Explorer is also in the works but Landy says the more difficult development process has delayed that.

"Microsoft wants add-ons to be written in .NET, but that's not bundled with XP and there are different versions in Vista and Windows 7," he said. "Developers don't want to develop if it's hard and there isn't a huge market of tech savvy people using IE." Landy added that the IE add-on should be available during February.

The inspiration for InvisibleHand came from Landy's own frustrations at online shopping. "I conducted a study into it," he tells CBR. "I used PriceGrabber to compare some prices with what they actually were and found that 16% had the wrong price. Why should I have to search for a product twice to find the best price?"

There are limits to InvisibleHand's reach - it can't yet crawl flight information to find the best deal for holidaymakers, for example. "The tech uses set parameters such as product name, makes and so on. Items that don't are called 'fuzzy' items - so the information is not identical, making it more difficult to compare," Landy said. 

Developments such as InvisibleHand should give the real-time tech sector a lift, Landy believes. "It could be an awakening for it. 24-hour news channels changed perceptions about real-time technology and how we consume it but they are no longer the first stop - people go to sites like Twitter or blogs instead," he said. "We've had retailers using InvisibleHand to check their prices against rival retailers. I don't think retail has had the attention it deserves for the way it has embraced real-time."

"Now it's taken the MacBook and the iPhone and distilled them into a single device that answers a rhetorical question you weren't really asking. The iPad falls between two stools - not quite a laptop, not quite a smartphone. In other words, it's the spork of the electronic consumer goods world," he continues.

Describing the iPad as a "solution looking for a problem," CBR's Jason Stamper asks if it is really a new category of device, as Jobs has claimed. "I fail to see that it is," he wrote. "Tablet computers have been around for many years. What makes the iPad drastically different? It runs a different operating system (most others run Windows or Linux) and because it's from Apple, integrates well with the likes of Apple's iTunes and its online iBookstore, and can run all the apps than run on the iPhone. That's about the long and short of it."

Timothy B. Lee, who describes himself as a lifelong Mac fanboy, says he's disappointed with the device. "I don't understand who this product is marketed for, and I'm disappointed that Apple has decided to adopt the iPhone's locked-down platform strategy," he writes. This has been one of the more popular criticisms of the iPad, that users are locked down to only running apps approved by Apple.

"The iPad appears to be Steve Jobs's attempt to roll back the multi-decade trend toward more open computing platforms. Jobs's vision of the future is one that revolves around a series of proprietary "stores"--for music, movies, books, and so forth--controlled by Apple. And rather than running the applications of our choice, he wants to limit users to running Apple-approved software from the Apple app store," Lee continued.

Gadget blog Gizmodo was one of many sites to produces a "what's wrong with the iPad" list. Their criticisms include: Big, ugly bezel; no multitasking; no camera; touch keyboard; no HDMI out; the name; no Flash and the fact that you need adapters to plug external devices into it. "No Flash is annoying but not a dealbreaker on the iPhone and iPod Touch. On something that's supposed to be closer to a netbook or laptop? It will leave huge, gaping holes in websites. I hope you don't care about streaming video! God knows not many casual internet users do. Oh wait, nevermind, they all do," Adam Frucci wrote about the lack of Flash on the iPad.

But it wasn't all bad. David Pogue in The New York Times said: "Until I saw the demo, I wondered why you'd want an iPad instead of a laptop. Now, though, it looks like Apple really has created something new. Criticisms of "Like a laptop" and "a big iPod Touch" don't really do justice to the possibilities," he says. Activities such as "web browsing, painting programs, TV and movies, newspapers and magazines" will all come naturally to iPad users. Initial tepid reaction to the device was part two of what Pogue describes as, "standard Apple new-category roll-out" response, which follows phase one - "months of feverish speculation and hype online, without any official indication by Apple that the product even exists."

Phase three will arrive when the iPad is finally released and people can get their hands on one. "Positive reviews, people lining up to buy the thing, and the mysterious disappearance of the basher-bloggers," is what we can expect.

Nicholas Carr, writing for The New Republic, says the iPad is a PC-killer. "The PC era ended this morning at ten o'clock Pacific time, when Steve Jobs stepped onto a San Francisco stage to unveil the iPad," he wrote. "Because the nature of personal computing has changed. Until recently, we mainly used our computers to run software programs (Microsoft Word, Quicken) installed on our hard drives. Now, we use them mainly to connect to the vast databases of the Internet--to "the cloud," as the geeks say." Carr echoes Pogue's thoughts that the iPad will be ideally suited to heavy consumers on media in its various forms - songs, TV shows, movies, games, the printed word. as he puts it.

Click here to see more pictures of Windows Phone 7...

The platform, redesigned from the ground up, starts with a customisable home screen. Microsoft calls these "live tiles" - and the user can create a "live tile" of a friend and gain a readable, up-to-date view of that person's latest pictures and posts.

Content on Windows Phone 7 Series is displayed through a series of "hubs". The People hub, shown above, lets the user see all relevant content associated with a contact, including live feeds from social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, and photos. Users can also update Twitter and Windows Live from here.

The Picture hub can sync photos from the phone, the PC and online albums into one view.

The Office hub provides access to Microsoft Office Mobile, Microsoft Office SharePoint and Microsoft Office OneNote.

For all you gamers out there, Windows Phone 7 Series brings the Xbox Liver experience to the phone.

The Music and Video hub turns the phone into a Zune player, offering music, radio, podcasts and videos.

There's no Flash support out of the box but Ballmer says that he's not against the idea, so expect that to appear at some point. It's worth noting of course that Apple still isn't allowing Flash on the iPhone.

Strangely, devices running Windows Phone 7 will not be available until the end of year. Remember when Nokia announced the N97 to a great reception? By the time it was actually released months later it had been gazumped by the iPhone. With Apple expected to update its device again during the summer, and Google's Nexus One now on the market, it's possible that Windows Phone 7 will suffer the same fate.

The survey also discovered a worrying disconnect between what users want from their laptops and what businesses are prepared to offer. The results are very similar to research conducted by Toshiba into the differences between IT decision makers and end users when it comes to laptop buying criteria.

The interesting thing about that stat is that it highlights just how important laptops are to the people who use them - so much so that 39% of workers have considered buying their own device, just so they can have more control over the buying criteria.

This is built out of the fact that IT departments and end users want different things from their laptop.

Nearly half (45%) of workers in Sony's survey rated weight and portability as one of their top three considerations; just 14% of employers thought the same. Likewise, 40% of employees put screen size in their top three considerations, compared to only 6% of employers.

When asked outright to rate the importance of personal choice for employees when selecting their work laptop, none of the employer respondents indicated this as a top 3 consideration. For employers, price (70%), build (51%) and performance (42%) are the top laptop priorities, the survey says.

Toshiba's survey revealed very similar results. The three most important considerations for businesses are quality and durability, performance (CPU, hard disc capacity and so on) and mobile connections. For the people who'll be using the devices, usability/ease of use, performance and security were at the top.

Interestingly, security was more important to end users than the business (see image below). Shouldn't businesses be very worried about how well their data is protected?

Toshiba also found that visual appeal was important to just a few IT decision makers compared to users, while the opposite was true for costs. After all, if the company is paying for it, why would the end user be particularly bothered how much it cost?

Chris Hirst, VAIO business category marketing manager, Sony UK, said: "We have long known the advantages of laptops in the workplace but the extent to which this research reveals how much emphasis employees place on laptops for work is quite astounding. Employees' expectations of the hardware that they use for work are rising, but employers aren't purchasing laptops to meet the full diversity of employees' needs."

Sony's research also turned up some worrying stats about laptop hardware. More than half of employers (57%) do not measure the lifetime value of laptops, leading to many spending money on repairing failed hardware with 71% of employers saying they would repair a laptop with a serious technical problem rather than replace it.

Just over half of those quizzed said they would like a better way to evaluate laptop ROI.

"Return on investment should be front of mind for any business making an investment in IT hardware. Central to this ROI should be establishing what the total cost of ownership is for an organisation's laptops," said Hirst. "Buying cheap hardware and then repairing it outside a non-comprehensive or short warranty can be an expensive exercise over the lifespan of a computer. Companies also need to consider employee productivity and downtime when purchasing hardware; a laptop should run for years, not months."