SlashGear scored an invite to Sprint’s “Shaking Things Up in 2011″ event at CES 2011 this week, and who should we bump into but RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis with a BlackBerry PlayBook tablet in-hand. He was good enough to demo the 7-inch QNX slate and answer some questions about it and RIM’s new focus on tablet computing; check it out, along with live PlayBook video, after the cut.
Apple has launched the Mac App Store, making its debut on OS X based MacBook and Mac machines with around 1,000 apps. Announced back in October 2010, the Mac App Store is an attempt to bring the massively successful App Store model from iOS to the desktop, including one-click downloads, free and paid apps, and automatic updates.
LG’s Optimus 2X was the first NVIDIA Tegra 2 powered “superphone” to be announced, though we know it won’t be the last; Motorola has since announced its own dual-core Android device, the Motorola ATRIX 4G. We caught up with NVIDIA and spent some time with the Optimus 2X earlier; check out our first impressions after the cut.
Video demo after the cut
Fast, silent and power-efficient; it seems like the only thing not to like about SSDs is the price. OCZ has sent over its Vertex 2 SSD, a 120GB model that straddles the performance/price boundary at around $220. Check out the full SlashGear review after the cut.
Mophie’s Juice Pack Air for iPhone 4 impressed us back in September with its minimal bulk and ability to almost double runtime versus the standard Apple battery. Still, there are some power users – or weekend travellers – for whom “virtually double” still isn’t good enough, hence the Mophie Juice Pack Plus. Bigger battery, bigger price; is this Mophie good value or overkill? Check out the full SlashGear review after the cut.
Google’s first Chrome OS notebook, the Cr-48, has landed on the SlashGear test bench, and to say it’s an interesting machine would be an understatement. The stealth-black 12.1-inch ultraportable is, like the color-scheme suggests, intended to fall into the background and let the Chrome OS platform take center-stage. Check out our full review after the cut.
Notebooks running Google Chrome OS aren’t expected to hit the market until mid-2011, so until now the only way to get your hands on a Google laptop is to sign up to the search giant’s pilot program and hope you get picked to try out one of the 12.1-inch ultraportables. Now, though, there’s another way: Google has given us five Cr-48 notebooks to give away, three for SlashGear readers and two over at our sibling site Android Community.
Google shook up the Android world with the Nexus One, throwing down the gauntlet to manufacturers to step up their hardware game and pushing the open-source platform to the bleeding edge of smartphone functionality. Now the search giant is back with its second self-branded device, the Nexus S, a Samsung-made handset with a few unique features of its own. Is this the best Android smartphone today, or just another Galaxy S sibling? Check out the full SlashGear review after the cut.
Our initial speed benchmarking with Verizon’s LTE service was enough to get us seriously interested in the high-speed 4G network, but there’s more to a mobile broadband service than just raw throughput. Has the LG VL600 LTE modem lived up to expectations? Check out the full SlashGear review after the cut.
Despite the speculation beforehand, Google launched the new Nexus S last week with little fanfare: no big press event, no gathering of Samsung, Android and T-Mobile execs on-stage to talk about how pleased they are to work together. A noticeable difference from the first-gen Nexus One, then, so does that make the Nexus S a minor update rather than another Android game-changer? Check out the SlashGear unboxing and some first-impressions after the cut.
Google VP Marissa Mayer took the stage at LeWeb 2010 today, and it was no surprise to see the search and user experience exec pull out a Nexus S. Unlike most Nexus S handsets – such as the unit we spent hands-on time with yesterday – Mayer’s phone is running the incoming Google Maps for Mobile 5.0, and they wasted no time before running through a demo.
Video demo after the cut
Nokia SVP of Design Marko Ahtisaari has admitted that the company still needs "to somehow regain the imagination," though as always that route won't involve Android. "We'll go where we can add value," Ahtisaari said at LeWeb 2010 this morning, "that's not the case at the moment with Android." Instead, Nokia's design team is focused on new homescreen paradigms ahead of MeeGo's launch in 2011, with Ahtisaari arguing that the UI dynamics of iOS, Symbian and Android aren't quite there yet.
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