SlashGear Week In Review - Week 6 2010
It's Super Bowl Sunday so the sports fans out there looking for something to do to kill some time until the game comes on can check out this week's week in review. We saw some cool gear last week so let's get right into it. You might think after Apple unveiled its iPad tablet the rumors would go away, but alas, that isn't correct. Apple is rumored to be working on a new larger screen tablet that runs Mac OS X.
That cool and small Alienware M11x gaming notebook is not available for pre-order and the full specs have been leaked. The notebook is set to hit on March 11. Apple issued its second attempt at a fix for the screen flicker issue on the 27-inch iMac computers this week. The update is called the "27-inch iMac Display Firmware Update 1.0."
The VeriFone PAYware iPhone credit card scanning system shipped this week. The software portion of the system is on the App Store for free. The Acer GD235HZ LCD was revealed and is ready for 3D gaming and movie watching. The display is designed for use with the NVIDIA 3D Vision glasses.
Olympus added some new super zoom cameras to its line early in the week including the SP-800UZ and the SP-600UZ. The 800UZ gets a whopping 30x zoom and the 600UZ gets 15x optical zoom. Dell pulled the covers off the Latitude 13 this week that looks a lot like the Vostro V13 we saw a while back. The new laptop is thin and ready for virtualization in the business environment right out of the box.
Amazon has announced that it is willing to renegotiate with HarperCollins on the pricing of digital books. We can thank Apple for the price changes since it agreed to the higher prices for iPad digital books, forcing Amazon to do the same or lose publishers. We learned that "The Woz" had a problem with his personal Prius where it accelerated to 97 mph on its own. Toyota reportedly plans to borrow the car and do some testing. The most shocking part of the story for me was that a Prius could do 97 mph.
A new firmware update for the iPhone was launched this week. The update is 3.1.3 and adds a few fixes, one of which is more battery meter accuracy. Sony showed off some of the most brightly colored VAIO notebooks ever called the VAIO E series. The machines are bright enough to make the Easter Bunny flinch.
HP has unveiled the TouchSmart 600 Quad series all-in-one notebook. The machined uses either a Core i7-720QM at either 1.6GHz or 1.73GHz. Hasselblad unveiled the H4D-40 digital camera with a massive resolution of 40MP. The camera retails for right at $20,000.
The Symbian OS went open source this week making it free for anyone to download and change. Symbian is the most widely used smartphone OS around and is on many Nokia handsets. A rumor cropped up this week that Sony might start charging for the PlayStation Network. That would mean you would have to pay to play your games online and there would be many angry PS3 owners out there if this turns out to be true.
The JooJoo tablet is shipping this month with full Flash support and an app store. I haven't heard anything on the suite between the maker of the tablet and the gang behind the failed CrunchPad in a while; I wonder what is going on. Silverstone unveiled a cool device this week called the HDDBOOST. The thing goes inside your computer and lets you use a SSD to boost the performance of your plain HDD by as much as 70%.
Some owners of the 27-inch iMac are getting a partial refund to help cover the woes many have been facing over screen flicker and other problems. The refund is 15% of the purchase price and it seems to be only given to those that have had multiple issues with their machines to cover shipping and tax. GM and NASA unveiled the most advanced humanoid robot ever this week called Robonaut 2. The robot is capable of doing work with its hands far beyond what any other robot is capable of, and it goes by the nickname R2 making it ever more cool. Thanks for reading this week's edition, see you next week. Go Saints!