SlashGear Week In Review - Week 35 2010
Welcome to the special holiday weekend edition of the SlashGear Week in Review. It was another busy week in the world of things electric and geeky so let's get right to it. We heard early in the week that YouTube was in talks to offer PPV movie rentals. Those streaming flicks were said to be coming at $5 per rental.
Xbox 360 online gamers got some bad news early in the week when word of a price increase surfaced. Starting this November the price for a yearlong Xbox LIVE gold membership moving up by $10 to $59.99. A new feature for Gmail surfaced called Priority Inbox that will look at your email and put messages that are important to you in a different box so you don't have to wade through so much to find the really good stuff. The feature will be rolled out to all Gmail users in the coming weeks.
The Aluratek Libre and Kobo eReaders finally for a price cut thanks to Borders. The new readers are selling for $130 for the Kobo and $100 for the Libre. That Sena Keyboard Folio for the iPad went official this week with its Bluetooth keyboard on one side. The case surfaced last week at the FCC.
The Viewsonic ViewPad 7 went official early in the week. The device will run Android 2.2 and sell in the UK for the equivalent of $541. Several Archos Android tablets were unveiled early in the week in different screen sizes. The new tablets include the Archos 28, 32, 43, 70 & 101.
The big news of the week was the announcements from Apple. One of the big unveilings was iOS 4.2 that will come to the iPad later this year. The new version of the Apple TV was shown off and the new version doesn't suck nearly as bad as the old version did.
Apple iTunes 10 was announced at the Apple event Wednesday. One of the key new features was the Ping social Network feature. A new Apple iPod touch was unveiled at the event mid-week with the Retina display from the iPhone 4 and a new A4 processor. The new touch starts at $229.
Apple also refreshed the iPod nano with the promise of 24 hour battery life and compatibility with Nike+. The new nano gets a square shape and a touchscreen. The Samsung Galaxy Tab was made official this week with a ship date in September. The device has a 7-inch screen and a 1GHz processor.
We went hands on at the Apple event with the new iPod Shuffle. The little Shuffle is a square device with easy to use controls in a smaller and lighter chassis. We also spent some hands on time with the fourth generation iPod touch. The new device is thinner than before at 0.28-inches thick with the iPhone 4 retina displays.
We also got hands on with the Toshiba Folio and put the process on video. The Folio runs Android 2.2 and has NVIDIA Tegra 2 inside. We found out late in the week that Sony had beat Apple in number of MP3 players sold with its Walkman. Sony was only able to beat Apple for one month and the feat was done a year ago so it wasn't tied to the anticipated new gear launched this week.
Toshiba issued a recall on some of its T series notebooks Friday. The recall was due to a burn hazard with machines overheating where the AC adapter plugs in. A really cool and very thin Native Union Moshi MM04 Bluetooth speaker turned up late in the week. The speaker is crazy thin and makes me think of honeybees.
Facebook has blocked one of the new and major features of iTunes 10, the Ping social network. The reason for the blocking of the API was that Apple didn't have permission to use the feature. Apple removed the feature altogether. We spent some hands on time with the Archos 70 and Archos 101 tablets this week. The tablets went official at IFA 2010.
Hands-on time was spent with the ViewPad 100 that dual boots Android and Windows 7. The tablet is more like a netbook than most tablets. LG offered up a sexy new 31-inch OLED TV at IFA and I want one really bad. The set is only 2.9mm thick. That's it for this week and have a good holiday weekend!