Twitter has begun rolling out an image uploading service after announcing the feature at the D9 Conference in San Francisco in June.

Users will now be able to upload photos directly from Twitter, rather than using third-party services.

Just as tweets are restricted to 140 characters, the photos will be limited to 3MB.

Depending on the size of the photo, it will take up a chunk of a user's 140-character tweet and, once posted, will be scaled to fit the display pane on the right of the Twitter timeline.

The big question is whether this new service will spell the end for TwitPic, which has run a photo-sharing service for Twitter users since 2008, and turned down a $10m acquisition offer two years ago.

Twitter's photo sharing service is pretty easy to use. Underneath the message box, users will see a camera icon, next to the compass icon, where they can upload photos from the device they are using.

A thumbnail of the image will appear in the lower left corner of the message box, and the character count will decrease according to the picture's size.

Twitter said that it will add a media gallery function in the coming weeks to show images that have been shared from Twitter's new image upload service or from third-party photo sharing services.

Apple unleashed the latest version of OS X Lion to the masses a little over two weeks ago, introducing a number of key features in the process. V3 has had a chance to get to grips with Lion on Apple's 11in MacBook Air and we've picked out some of the key features that will help you to get the most out of your Mac.

1. Use swiping gestures with multiple desktops
The trackpad has been redefined, allowing a number of swiping gestures using two and three fingers.

Scrolling and pinch-to-zoom are welcome features, and work remarkably well on the trackpad. However, we've found the most useful gesture to be the three-fingered horizontal swipe that allows you to navigate between full screen applications. A nifty way to use this is to create multiple desktops, which you can then cycle between.

To do this, you simply bring up Mission Control, add another desktop by hovering the mouse over the top right hand corner and then populate that desktop with specific apps. You can then keep internet windows in one desktop, word documents in the second, mail in the third and handily cross-reference between them with a single swipe.

2. Use Thunderbolt to transport data
Apple has been heavily promoting this feature over the past few months and it's now usable in the latest Mac devices. Thunderbolt allows high-speed transfer between two Apple Mac devices. We were able to use the port to transfer data from a MacBook Air to a Mac Mini.

To do this we had to set up the MacBook as an external hard drive by activating Target Disk Mode.

This was done by connecting the Thunderbolt cable and holding down the letter 'T' when booting up the Air. The Thunderbolt icon displayed on the screen of the MacBook and the device appeared as an external hard drive on the host - in this case the Mac Mini.

To give you an idea of Thunderbolt's speed, we transferred a 1.27GB file between Macs in just under two minutes. The same transfer took 15 minutes to load onto a USB stick and around 50 minutes to complete via AirDrop.

3. Sync revamped Mail app with Outlook
Apple has revamped its Mail feature, and the application now mirrors the iPad two-column interface. We like the conversation-style thread, which separates messages cleanly, and the full screen view.

However, the best feature by far is the dynamic search which automatically brings up suggestions when you start typing in a person's name or subject. This makes searching painless as relevant messages are instantly displayed. Finding the right email is considerably faster than using the search in traditional Outlook and Lotus Notes clients.

V3 also managed to synchronise corporate email from an Exchange 2003 server within the native Mail app. This was done by setting up an email account and choosing 'IMAP' as the account type. We then entered the IP address of the Incoming Mail Server, along with our username and password.

Alternatively, it is possible to download apps such as Mail Access 2003 from the Mac Store to get comprehensive functionality.

4. Multi-user screen sharing
Screen Sharing has been improved and now enables remote log-in to a separate account on another Mac.

Benefits include allowing IT admins to remotely troubleshoot problems and carry out upgrades without causing disruption. Business customers can also use the feature to work independently when using the same machine.

Screen Sharing still needs some tweaks, and browsing the web using the virtual desktop can be a bit ropey. But, for business users, it's good to know there is a tool available with which files on a Mac can be accessed in case there is an emergency.

   
5. Use the Apple Mac App Store
Although this has been out since January, the Mac App Store will prove a key feature for those using Apple's portable devices as they lack DVD drives. It's possible to get key software from the App Store, including vast numbers of productivity apps, and the importance of this store is only likely to increase as Apple puts more emphasis on cloud storage with the launch of iCloud.

 
6. Airdrop
This makes it possible to share files even when there is no Wi-Fi present.  A Mac will automatically locate any other AirDrop-capable device within 30 feet and allow an encrypted file transfer between them.

7. Resume
One thing that has always separated Macs from PCs is the impressive boot time. Apple has now added a 'Resume' feature which means that the Mac will automatically re-open all apps that were being used in the last session. This has been very useful as it allowed us to pick up right where we left off numerous times.

8. Autosave
Another invaluable feature that automatically saves files every five minutes, giving that extra piece of mind.

9. Mission Control
Among the noticeable visual tweaks are the Mission Control and Launchpad interfaces. Mission Control can be brought up by swiping three fingers upwards, and shows a bird's eye view of all applications being used on a particular desktop.

Windows from the same application are automatically grouped together, allowing you to keep track of what can otherwise become a crowded desktop. This is a great way of checking exactly what is running, particularly for those who may forget that they have left an app running in the background which they no longer need.

10. Launchpad
Apple has also brought the highly acclaimed iOS interface to the Mac for the first time. This shows applications in icon format, providing a quick way of accessing applications that are not stored in the dock.

It's possible to create folders, just like on the iPhone 4 or iPad 2, and anything downloaded from the Mac App Store will be located here.

RIM has not released any high-end smartphones for the best part of a year, and is aiming to make up lost ground by launching three major handsets from the end of August.

V3 got some precious hands-on time with the Bold 9900, Torch 2 and Torch 9860 and, judging by first impressions, RIM looks to be back on track after an unsteady start to 2011.

RIM was particularly keen to show off the Bold Touch, which is a significant improvement over previous models in the range. Although the Touch retains the familiar candy bar form factor, numerous changes have been made to the design.

The Touch weighs in at 110g and is just 10.5mm thick, making it RIM's thinnest device to date. Premium materials have been used to craft the 9900, and it really shows. The high-end look is perfectly illustrated by the distinctive stainless steel frame and the space age back cover. This is definitely the best looking RIM device to date.

As the name suggests, the Bold Touch will be the first in the range to have touch-screen functionality. This allows users to touch applications to open them, swipe between home screens, as well as scroll and pinch-to-zoom when viewing web pages.

The responsiveness of the touch screen was impressive, but it remains to be seen how well touch input will actually work on a display that is only 2.8in in size.

RIM has always had one of the best Qwerty keyboards on the market, and the firm has made the letters on the Touch a little bit bigger and reduced the annoying clicking sound. Another impressive feature is browsing, which RIM claims is 40 per cent faster. Anyone who has used a Bold will know that web pages can take an age to load over 3G, so this is an overdue  improvement.

The Bold 9900 will ship with a 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 768MB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage. However, as the majority of smartphones now ship with dual-core processors and at least 1GB of RAM, RIM needs to improve in this area, much like HTC.


Meanwhile, we found the 3.7in Torch 9860 intriguing, although it is unlikely to make a significant dent in sales of the iPhone and high-end Android devices. Design-wise it is similar to the Google Nexus S, as it has a curved back.

RIM also showcased the BlackBerry Torch 2, which is more of a standard refresh. RIM has doubled the power of the handset and loaded BlackBerry 7 OS.

V3 will post full reviews of the BlackBerry Bold Touch 9900, Torch 2 and Torch 9860 soon.

A video demonstration of the Bold Touch is below:

Thirty years ago, the platform that would become MS-DOS was born, and went on to power the first PCs and underpin the earliest versions of Windows.

In actual fact, July 27 1981 was the date that Microsoft acquired a product called 86-DOS or Q-DOS ('quick and dirty operating system') from Seattle Computer Products, and hastily adapted it to produce the PC-DOS for IBM's new personal computer line.

However, Microsoft retained the rights to sell its own version of PC-DOS as MS-DOS from 1982, and this move is widely credited with opening the door for third-party PC-compatible systems, laying the foundations for today's personal computer industry.

Many computer users around today will quite possibly never have seen or even heard of MS-DOS, but you can get a flavour of the way things used to be by bringing up the command prompt in Windows and typing commands like DIR to list the contents of a directory (folder).

By today's standards, MS-DOS was laughably primitive, and provided only the most rudimentary services for applications and the end user. It did not support multi-tasking, meaning that only a single application could be used at once.

MS-DOS was originally developed for the Intel 8086 processor, and so was not designed to access more than a megabyte of total memory, a limitation that soon required numerous technical workarounds as software became more complex and newer chips supported ever larger memory address spaces.

The lack of any real graphical APIs also meant that programmers had to build their own user interface from scratch, with the result that applications had a radically different look and feel from each other, and users often had to learn arcane key combinations for functions, which also differed wildly between applications.

Windows eventually fixed this, but PCs were not really powerful enough to drive a GUI desktop environment until the 1990s.

Early versions of Windows actually ran on top of MS-DOS, with users having to start the graphical environment from the command line.

From Windows 95 onwards, it became increasingly hidden, with users having less and less need to be aware of its existence, but only actually disappeared when Microsoft killed off the Windows 9x line and merged its 'consumer' and 'professional' versions of Windows onto the NT kernel.

Many DOS programs can still be run on modern PCs inside emulators such as DOSBox.

It is also interesting to note that the 86-DOS on which the original MS-DOS was based was effectively an x86 variant of CP/M, an even older operating system that was widely used on 8-bit computers, meaning that you can draw a line of descent from today's Windows PCs right back to the earliest personal computers.

Apple has launched OS X 10.7 Lion which, as the name implies, should be the best and most useful version of the operating system yet.

This is more than just a service pack upgrade. There are lots of new features that add some genuinely interesting and potentially useful tools. Take, for example, multi-touch gestures via the trackpad. This allows you to move between apps, zoom in or out with a pinch or view Apple's new, grandly named 'Mission Control'.

Mission Control shows what applications are running, and provides access to places like the desktop or to open commonly used apps. It also adds the ability to see multiple open windows in apps.

So take, for example, your web browser. With several tabs open, you can see what pages you're looking at. It's very handy indeed and, while Windows 7 has some similar tools, it lacks this centralised approach.

It's not all good news, though. Apple has annoyed some users by removing support for some older applications. It has also removed Front Row for Lion, which means that people using Mac Minis for media centre purposes should avoid the update.

There have also been complaints that older, but still essential, software has stopped working, and that external monitors don't play well with the full screen mode. And many users don't like the fact that the scrolling is now reversed by default. This is to give an iOS feel, in common with the way scrolling works on an iPhone or iPad.

And, unsurprisingly, Apple has also removed Rosetta from OS X Lion. This means that old apps coded for PowerPC systems will not work at all. In Snow Leopard, it could be manually installed. In Lion it can't be accessed at all.

And one new feature worthy of some minor ridicule is the ability to maximise a window, which has been missing from Mac OS since it was launched. It has, of course, been on Linux multiple window managers and Microsoft Windows for a very long time. Mac users always used to claim that maximising windows wasn't necessary, so it will be interesting to see if their tune changes at all.

There are some great new features here, and it's going to be interesting to see what Microsoft can achieve with Windows 8 next year. The main difference between the two is, of course, that Microsoft still sees Windows as a tablet-suitable OS, whereas Apple has a forked its platforms into two distinct branches: desktop and mobile.

All new Macs sold from now will have OS X Lion. If you have an older Mac, you can upgrade for £20.99. It's obvious that Apple is keeping OS X at the forefront of what it does, even though it makes almost no money in itself.

A US-based company is offering a product that is unique, as far as we can tell: a laptop with dual 17in displays, aimed at creative professionals and other high-end users.

The Spacebook from gScreen Corp is not yet available, but the company is taking pre-orders from customers in the US and Canada.

Looking like a conventional laptop when closed, the Spacebook has a second screen that apparently slides out from behind the first when open, giving two 17in displays each capable of resolutions up to 1,920x1,080 pixels.

The rest of the specifications include Intel Core i5 or i7 processors, up to 8GB of memory, an Nvidia Geforce GTS 250M GPU, and a DVD Super-Multi drive, making the Spacebook effectively a dual-screen mobile workstation.

Of course, this comes at a cost and weight disadvantage. The Spacebook weighs in at an arm-stretching 4.5kg and is over 40cm wide. Prices start at $2,395, or about £1,500.

Sadly, gScreen is taking orders only from customers in the US and Canada at the moment, but this will presumably change if there is enough interest from other territories.

V3.co.uk visited Silverstone on Friday to catch practice ahead of qualifying for the British Grand Prix. We were given a sneak peek into the Mercedes GP Petronas team pit garage where we had a look at some of the tech on Nico Rosberg's car.

The cars are stripped down and subjected to very precise checks before being sent out onto the track.

Brake fluids are located at the front end, and the brakes are housed inside cake tin-like structures. The brakes on a Formula 1 car are extremely efficient and can bring the car from 62mph to 0mph in about 15 metres. A high performance roadcar needs around 30 metres.

A Kinetic Energy Recovery System is built into the Mercedes GP car, taking energy generated by the braking process and reusing it to provide a short-term boost which can be activated by the driver. 

The brakes are connected to the suspension. Below we can see the front suspension, which weighs a couple of kilograms and comes with different layers of carbon fibre. The suspension is designed to handle large amounts of force in multiple directions, and can take the stress of a seven tonne weight, for example.

Aerodynamics are key in Formula 1, and the front and rear wings are designed to create downforce to push the tyres onto the track, improve cornering and reduce drag. Drivers can make limited adjustments to the front and rear wings from the cockpit during a race.

Mercedes was testing a redesigned exhaust on Friday, but at the time of writing there was confusion surrounding the off-throttle diffuser technology relating to this part.

Some teams, including Mercedes GP, have been able to blow exhaust gases over the rear floor of the car even when the driver is not pushing down on the accelerator. This has the effect of increasing downforce and grip, but there are claims that this is giving some teams an unfair advantage.

When I reviewed Microsoft's Office 365 last week, I tested the cloud-based productivity suite on Windows PCs, running either Windows 7 or Windows XP.

To recap, Office 365 provides access to cloud-hosted versions of Exchange and SharePoint, plus Microsoft's Lync telephony client and web-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.

However, with most of the capabilities of Office 365 provided through a browser, it should be possible for users on other platforms, such as Mac or Linux, to gain access to Office features.

To find out, I tried accessing my test account on an Apple iMac and a PC running Ubuntu with a version of Firefox.

The results were encouraging, everything looking and functioning exactly as it does when you access it from a PC. It would seem that Microsoft has done a pretty good job of ensuring cross-platform support via the browser, with this suite at least.

On both the Mac and Ubuntu I was able to access Outlook and send and receive email, check the calendar, and even edit shared documents stored on SharePoint using the Office Web Apps such as Word.

The one area where this falls down is with Lync, Microsoft's messaging and telephony tool. Unlike the other functions, this is a full-blown software client that must be installed locally, and non-Windows users are out of luck here.

While there is a version of Microsoft's Communicator (the old name for Lync) for Mac OS, Microsoft states on its Office 365 web site: "At this time Communicator for Mac 2011 will not work with Office 365."