SlashGear Week in Review – July 20th

The budget ultraportable trend showed no signs of slowing this week, as Acer’s Aspire One hit US shelves priced from $379.  Meanwhile, sources close to Dell’s suppliers tipped the company’s upcoming ‘E’ netbook as carrying a mere $299 price tag, and perhaps even landing as early as next month.

As for grown-up notebooks, Intel finally made the Centrino 2 platform official, and with it the promise of not only faster processors but native draft-N WiFi support and longer battery life.  In fact this week the company had plenty to be pleased about, as they soundly thrashed arch-rival AMD with their Q2 2008 financial performance.

One manufacturer with new Centrino 2 machines in their line-up is Sony, and we spent some hands-on time with the new VAIO range at the beginning of the week.  As for reviews, this week we looked at VTech’s IS6110 instant messenger DECT phone (and came away less than massively impressed) as well as Palm’s new 3G Treo 800w (which was, frankly, equally disappointing).

In gaming, we summarised Microsoft’s new Xbox Experience as well as the news that Sony has a new, 80GB PS3 in the works for a September release.  Activision also gave us some good news regarding Rock Band instruments and their compatibility with Guitar Hero.

Filed under “what took them so long”, Apple finally got around to taking OS X clone manufacturer Psystar to court over accusations of trademark and copyright infringement as well as violation of its EULA.  Some wondered if the Cupertino company had bitten off more than it bargained for, however; not from a strong rebuttal from Psystar but from the possibility that Apple will be forced to licence out its software.  Also in the courts, ATI and NVIDIA faced more unpleasant evidence as part of the price-fixing class action against them.

Finally, chumps-of-the-week award goes to AT&T, for their on-again, off-again iPhone WiFi farce.  After several rounds of confirming and denying over complementary wireless for the first-gen iPhone, the carrier has once again “accidentally” announced and then withdrawn the offer for the iPhone 3G (of which in excess of one million were sold over the weekend, with stock delays stretching into weeks).  Incidentally, you can read SlashGear’s review of the iPhone 3G here.

Regular readers may have noticed a flip back from the video Week in Review; we’re reworking staff here at SlashGear, and frankly you wouldn’t want to see my ugly face!  We’re hoping to return to the video format in the near future, so keep reading!