SlashGear Week In Review - Week 26 2009
It has been an eventful week in the geek world with all sorts of new products and important announcements turning up for the first time. The big story of the week was the launch of the iPhone 3GS last Friday. Word came on Monday that the 3GS sold a whopping 1 million units in its first three days of availability. Unfortunately, for some users, it took them an extra three days just to get their shiny new iPhone 3GS activated. Despite the fact that activation failures were on AT&T's side of the iPhone equation, Apple offered users $30 in iTunes credit as a sorry AT&T sucks peace offering to new owners.
Apple did have a problem that was first reported last week that it had no one else to blame for. Some MacBook Pro models were having a problem with SATA speeds, but Apple issued a fix for the SATA problem on Tuesday. The issue only reared its head on Pro models that were equipped with the factory SSD option.
Intel and Nokia had been teasing the tech community with promises of a big announcement that many had pegged as a Nokia MID or netbook running Intel hardware. The reveal was a letdown for many of us as the two firms announced that they would be collaborating on open source software like Moblin and Maemo and that Intel would be licensing Nokia HSPA modem tech. AT&T also released its iPhone OS 3.0 supporting AT&T Navigator application this week. The app turns the iPhone 3G and 3GS devices running the latest OS version into full featured turn-by-turn navigation devices. The big catch is that the App costs $9.99 per month.
Perhaps the largest announcement this week was the official introduction of the HTC Hero Android-powered smartphone. The device may have been leaked in the excess prior to its official introduction, but it was still an important event. In fact, we got our hands on the Hero and spent some time fondling it on video just for you, and the Hero is certainly sweet. The Pre is still big news since its launch a few weeks back and word came out on Thursday that the Pre had racked up a cool one million app downloads in its first 18 days of availability.
That number is better than many though at first glance when you step back and look at the number of downloads per Pre user. The stats show that most Pre users are much more likely to download an App than iPhone users are.
We also found out from iSuppli on Thursday that Apple is making that bank on the iPhone 3GS. The handset was torn down and found to have $178.96 in parts inside that sleek little form factor. Who knows how much the Apple marketing machine, shipping and packaging adds to that price though. Microsoft announced the pricing for its Windows 7 OS Thursday as well with pre-orders set to start on June 26. As you can imagine the OS is hardly cheap. A full version of Windows 7 Ultimate will sell for $319.99, ouch.
I have been waiting for NVIDIA Ion netbooks to hit the market since January when I got my first hands on look at the Ion platform at CES. Lenovo announced a new S12 netbook Friday that uses the Ion platform and does full 1080p video. The machine will sell for $499.99 with Ion and $449.99 without, that's not such a bad price gap really. Friday we posted up our own hands on, in-depth review of the iPhone 3GS and found it to be good. We also posted up our review of the Acer Aspire Timeline 3810T notebook Friday. The coolest thing about it is that the runtime was six hours in our testing on a charge, not bad for a notebook.
That's the big announcements and features for the week, tune back in next week when I run down some of the coolest events from the geeky tech world again.