SlashGear Week In Review - Week 8 2010
Welcome to the latest edition of the SlashGear Week in Review! On Monday we learned that NVIDIA would be launching the GTX 480 and 470 video cards in late March. These are the first of the Fermi-based video cards. Lenovo unveiled new notebooks including the X201, X201s, and C201t along with the W701 and W701ds machines this week. The W701ds is the most interesting with an extra screen grafted on the side of the 17-inch main screen.
Viewsonic pulled the wraps off its cool ViewBook Pro VNB131 ultraportable this week. The machine has an optical drive or an extra battery that can by slid into the module expansion bay. AT&T has been named tops in recent 3G performance tests by PC World. Often maligned AT&T beat out other competitors by a wide margin.
Three Windows Phone 7 chassis designs were detailed in a podcast with folks from Microsoft Australia. The new OS will go into chassis 1 with touchscreens and 1GHz CPUs, chassis 2 will have keyboards and touchscreens, Chassis 3 is an unknown.
The Apple iPad has been confirmed to have PowerVR SGX graphics hardware. This is the same hardware as the iPhone 3GS. Bloom energy is set to revolutionize renewable power with a new device dubbed the Energy Server. The big unit uses fuel cells to create electricity.
Mid-week we reviewed the Synology DS710+ NAS device. The biggest issue with the device for us was the price, without drives, the thing costs $560 and with a pair of 1TB drives it is $860. The cool Olympus PEN E-PL1 is now on sale for $600. The camera is a budget micro four-thirds camera with 12.3MP resolution.
Pentax revealed its latest superzoom camera called the X90. The point-and-shoot camera has a 26x optical zoom lens. The Nintendo DSi XL got an official launch date for the US this week and a price of $190. The new DSi will hit stores on March 28.
The ATI Radeon HD 5830 went official this week with performance that was disappointing to some coupled with a under $250 price point that may be too expensive. Pentax debuted the Optio W90 rugged camera this week. The cam can survive drops, cold weather, and is waterproof.
New Asus Eee netbooks were leaked later in the week including the 1018p, 1016p, and 1015p. The machines will be officially unveiled at CeBIT in early March. Acer is set to hit us with new Calpella Slim ultraportable notebooks in Q2. The machines will be offered in 13, 14, and 15-inch units.
Pricing on the active glasses for Samsung 3D TVs was unveiled this week. At $150 per set, the glasses will add lots of cost to entering the 3D TV realm with Samsung hardware. Friday an analysts unveiled that cheaper iPhones are believed to be coming in June. The handsets are also said to have new gesture tech inside. I will believe it when I see it. Thanks for reading! Have a good weekend!