Photos: Undersea cables, Olympic IT, Bletchley, Goonhilly, CES gadgets and Android 3.0

Photos of the month - January 2011

silicon.com took a look at the history of international telecommunications in January.

To this day, teams from Cable&Wireless Worldwide are engaged in laying telecoms cables between continents on seabeds, as can be seen here.

Discover more about how modern international telecoms networks were built in this story: Photos: From transatlantic telegraph cables to modern fibre optics.

Also in January, it was announced that the UK's first fully operational general-purpose computer is to be recreated at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park.

The rebuilding work is being overseen by the Computer Conservation Society, a special interest group at the BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, and is expected to take four years to complete.

Find out more about the work to rebuild Edsac here: Photos: Rebirth of trailblazing Edsac computer.

And from one old bit of kit to another: the satellite dish site that received the first live transatlantic television broadcast is to become a centre for space research.

The Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station on Cornwall's Lizard Peninsula, at one time the largest satellite earth station in the world, is subject of a new business deal that could see its dishes used as part of a radio telescope or to communicate with spacecraft.

Find out more about Goonhilly's future via Photos: Landmark satellite site to explore the cosmos.

From old to brand-new tech - this is the hub where the technology for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games is being put through its paces.

Computing equipment in the Olympics Technology Lab will undergo 200,000 hours of testing before the opening ceremony of the Games next year.

See more pictures of the testing lab by checking out Photos: Inside London 2012 Olympic Games tech lab.

The major tech event in January was the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, where the great and the good - apart from Apple - gathered to show off their wares for the coming year.

silicon.com picked out some of the most interesting devices announced at CES 2011, where proceedings were dominated by tablet PCs and smartphones.

But a few other technologies were also unveiled, including an updated version of Microsoft's Surface touchscreen technology. Microsoft worked with Samsung to develop the 40-inch, high-definition, LCD multitouch screen, which is much thinner than its predecessor.

To see what else made the headlines at the show, check out Photos: The gadgets of CES 2011.

One of the most eye-catching tablet devices at CES was Motorola's Xoom tablet, running Google's tablet-optimised Honeycomb version of the Android operating system.

The Xoom's 1,280x800-pixel screen is designed to support the playback of HD content, as shown above.

See what other features Motorola hopes will make the Xoom stand out from the tablet crowd, in Photos: Motorola launches Android-powered Xoom tablet.

Android 3.0 packs a raft of new features to make the most of devices with larger screens than the average smartphone. One new feature coming in Honeycomb - called Recent Apps - has been designed to improve the experience of multitasking. Recent Apps displays a snapshot of applications the user has been running recently, and also any tasks that are underway, to make it easier to navigate between apps and tasks.

For more on Honeycomb's new features see Photos: Android 3.0 - what's under Honeycomb's hood?.

Apple's Mac App Store arrived for its Mac line of PCs in January and more than one million apps were downloaded from the site in the first day it went live.

Shown above is the screen in Mac App Store where users can browse apps by categories, including business, graphics and design, developer tools, education and news.

To find out more see Photos: Apple Mac App Store in detail.

Screenshot: Apple

Business software giant Oracle recently upped its software-as-a-service game with the launch of a Cloud Office suite of applications, clearly aimed at taking on Google Apps and Microsoft Office Web Apps.

One of the features of Cloud Office allows users to choose a theme for their Oracle Cloud Office portal - such as the wood-themed workspace page shown above.

Take a look at Photos: Oracle Cloud Office in the flesh to learn more.

Screenshot: Oracle

silicon.com also put Windows Phone 7 (WP7) owners in the frame in January - taking a closer look at the apps on offer for Microsoft's newest smartphone platform. Office-friendly fare includes the Presenter app, pictured above, which enables a WP7 handset to be used to control PowerPoint presentations.

For more handy WP7 apps, see Photos: Windows Phone 7 - apps for office workers.

Smartphone-owning business travellers who frequently fly from Heathrow? There's an app for that - the Heathrow Express app lets smartphone owners buy virtual tickets on their handset, doing away with the need to carry a piece of paper.

For more images of the app, see Photos: Heathrow Express app kills paper tickets.

Another app to arrive on the scene in January was First Direct's banking app - described by the company as the first UK banking app to let people move their money while on the move.

For more images of the iPhone app, see Photos: First Direct iPhone banking app lets mobile Brits make payments.

The latest Skype iPhone app arrived in January and added two-way video-calling for the first time. The app features audio muting, speaker amplification, call holding and the ability to turn off video broadcasting, as shown above.

To find out what other features the Skype app has, see: Photos: iPhone gets Skype video-calling update.

January was also the time when silicon.com looked back at the tech highs and lows of 2010.

An undeniable success, if only for the way it gave rise to a slew of competitors, was the Apple iPad tablet PC.

Discover more of 2010's tech successes and failures at Photos: Tech's highs and lows in 2010.

Microsoft Kinect was born as a motion-tracking controller for the Xbox 360 games console but since its release, developers have hacked the device to allow it to work with everything from PCs to robots.

This hack allows Star Wars fans to get their hands on a virtual lightsaber by tracking the movements of the user wielding a wooden stick, and then rendering a lightsaber over the top.

Check out more images of the most interesting hacks out there in Kinect: Photos of the best hacks.