SlashGear Week In Review- Week 2 2011
Welcome to the second edition of the Week in Review of 2011. This week was CES 2011 so we have tons of cool new gear to talk about. One of the coolest DIY projects I have ever seen is the Return of the Jedi lightsaber made by Bradley Lewis. He made the thing out of machined aluminum parts and it has a removable blade.WallWizard showed off its new line of motorized wall mounts that have a cool iPhone app for control. The app allows you to control the mount from across the room using your iPhone. Angry Birds hit the PSP and PS3 consoles this week as a mini game. The game offers 63 levels and will land on other game consoles later in the year.
An interesting MID called the OCOSMOS OSC1 landed at CES. The tablet has an Intel Oak Trail processor inside along with a 5-inch touchscreen, a slide out keyboard and it runs Windows 7. I bet there are some of you out there that didn't wake up on time last weekend thanks to the iPhone alarm bug. That bug was supposed to fix itself on January 3 and didn't. We still don't know exactly what caused the alarm issue to start with.
AMD made its cool Fusion APUs official this week. These little gems pack in support for DirectX 11, 1080p HD, and 10 hours of battery life. Angry Birds for Windows Phone 7 won't launch for months apparently. The game is on most other mobile platforms, is very popular, and has even made its way to some game consoles this week.
The Garmin StreetPilot app for the iPhone landed this week. The app is on the App Store right now for $39.99. The Tesla Model S and BMW vehicles are getting NVIDIA Tegra inside their vehicle infotainment systems. The Tegra chip will run the gauges and the large 12.1-inch touchscreen in the Tesla Model S.
50 Cent is the latest rapper to get in on the branded headphone market, but his set is much cooler than others I have seen. Fity calls his headphones the Sleek by 50 Cent and they have carbon fiber in the design. Asus went official with the EeePad Slider at CES. The tablet runs Android and has a cool slide out keyboard and a 10.1-inch screen.
We laid eyes on the cool Toshiba 3D TV at CES that needs no glasses. This is the sort of TV all people looking to go 3D have been waiting for. Toshiba says the set isn't ready for the market yet, and we agree, but the tech has some promise. Qualcomm purchased Athros this week for a massive $3.1 billion. the purchase will get Qualcomm into computing, networking, and consumer products in a big way and branch Qualcomm into some new categories.
We spent a bit of hands on time with the Notion Ink Adam at CES. We think the Adam is a very impressive Android tablet and its Eden UI is one of the coolest parts about the tablet. We also ran some benchmarks on the Adam at CES and some Flash testing. We loaded Quadrant Advanced on the Adam, it scored 1,836, and we point out that Froyo isn't optimized for multithreading so real world performance will be different.
Samsung has unveiled a new Sliding PC 7 Series that looks interesting. The machine is a combination of a notebook and a mobile PC skirting the land between tablet and netbook. It runs Windows 7 and weighs in at 2.2 pounds with up to 64GB of storage, a 10.1-inch screen, and an Atom Z670 CPU at 1.66GHz. What appear to be parts for the Verizon iPhone have been spotted online. The parts could also be for the next iteration of the iPhone, but the Verizon version is more likely if these pics aren't fake.
Motorola has unveiled the Atrix 4G smartphone at CES hailed as the most powerful smartphone in the world. The thing is very impressive sounding on paper and is the first smartphone to ship with real RAM inside. Apple retail workers learned this week that there were no vacation days coming the last three weeks of January. This usually happens when new gear is coming and the Verizon iPhone is what is expected.
The Apple Mac App Store launched this week with about 1000 apps to start with. The store ended up moving a huge number of apps in the first few days it was available proving the store is very popular. Verizon went official with the HTC ThunderBolt smartphone. The device is the first LTE smartphone in the country and has nice specs like Android 2.2.1, 8GB of storage, and a microSD card slot with a single core 1GHz CPU.
JVC unveiled a cool new 3D camcorder at CES that records 3D in full 1080p resolution. It is the first camcorder for consumers to do 1080p 3D and it will cost you with a retail price a touch under $2000. A Chinese auction site has 50,000 stolen iTunes accounts up for auction with 12 hours of access offered to the accounts for about 15 cents here in the US. The site refuses to pull the auction until it gets an official request from Apple.
We ran into Mike Lazaridis at an event at CES and he whipped out the BlackBerry PlayBook and showed the thing off. We liked the bright and clear screen along with the capacitive controls in the bezel; the thing is pretty darn cool. Steve Jobs took only a buck in salary from Apple in 2010 according to documents filed by Cupertino. The board at Apple also asked for a clear succession policy for Steve is he was unable to continue at CEO of Apple.
Reports are coming in that the iPhone on Verizon may launch on February 3. That makes me wonder if the phone is coming on February 3, why the blocked vacation days for the three weeks in January? The Wall Street Journal has reported that the Verizon iPhone is going to launch on January 11. That fits in with the days workers can't take off at Apple stores and makes that February 3 date more questionable.
After all the gear was unveiled at CES, the item voted best in show was the Motorola Xoom tablet. I admit the thing looks really cool with its Tegra 2 processor, HDMI output, 10-inch screen, and LTE data access. I want one. Thanks for reading this week's edition, see you next time!