SlashGear Week in Review- Week 20 2011

This week was the big Google conference and tons of news came out of this show, we had a very busy week here at SlashGear; with that let us get to it. Sony promised Monday that the PSN would be fully back and running by May 31. So far, Sony has offered very few details on the outage and what has been done to prevent it from happening again.

NVIDIA announced Monday that it would be acquiring mobile communications firm Icera. The purchase is the latest step in NVIDIA's march to become "the" processor company for the post-PC era. A video of a student pilot and his experimental airplane turned up that shows the 17-year-old getting ready for a competition to see who can land their plane and take off in the shortest distance. The kid needs only tens of feet and that ability is highly valued in an Alaskan bush pilot.

Scientists are at work on a very wild sounding device that will allow them to communicate with dolphins. The gadget looks sort of like a smartphone and lets the dolphins request things from humans. Microsoft announced Tuesday that it would be purchasing Skype for over $5 billion. The buy will see Skype integrated into lots of Microsoft products and comes with a promise to continue to support other platforms.

Tuesday we learned that the iPad 2 is as fast and powerful as an 80's supercomputer. The iPad 2 has enough processing power to have stayed in the top machines on the list of most powerful computers through the early 90's. Early on Google was rumored to be in the running to purchase Skype. Word came mid-week that Google had walked away from the purchase with one of the founders saying about the purchase talks, "This is the dumbest shit I've ever seen."

A Mexican drug cartel's captured, homemade tank turned up this week. The tank was captured after its non-armored tires were shot out. Facebook admitted late in the week that it has waged an anti-Google PR campaign. Facebook claims that it hired a PR firm to seed news against Google in an attempt to raise alarm over policies Google has on user privacy.

A video of what may be one of the smallest, yet most functional apartments in the world surfaced Thursday. The apartment is in Spain and has most of the things needed for living hidden away inside a wall. Adobe Flash Player 10.3 hit the Android Market late last week. The update is offered for Android 2.2, 2.3, and 3.01 devices and adds in new features and bug fixes.

Netflix has launched an Android app for select smartphones and this is one of the apps that many users have been waiting for. The app will work on the HTC Incredible, Nexus One, Evo 4G, G2, and the Nexus S so far. A sweet concept device for the iPhone 4 extends the device and adds gaming controls. It looks a bit like the PSP to me with the concept device attached.

Retailers in the UK tipped that the PSN outage has caused more than a few PS3 gamers to defect to the Xbox. Apparently one major retailer in the UK has saw trade ins of the PS3 grow 200% since the second week of the outage. Samsung showed off a new 10.1-inch tablet screen with a resolution of 2560 x 1600 that might be the Retina display used on the iPad 3. The screen is also has an outdoor viewing mode and lots more.

Friday a letter leaked from Sony that revealed new details on the hack of the PSN. The letter claims that on April 19 four servers rebooted themselves and unusual activity was noticed on the network bringing the first indication of the hack. Friday Vince posted up his review of the iMac Core i5 3.10GHz AIO computer that was just released. Vince calls the new machines a polished update on one of the best AIOs on the market. Thanks for reading this week's edition, if you want more Google I/O news, check the links below. See you next time!

Google I/O 2011 Coverage:

There was so much going on at Google I/O last week that the entire Week in Review would have been links to the show coverage. If you want to know more about what went on at Google I/O with our coverage this week, I will run down the big features here. The video from the show of all keynotes and sessions is now online. Google gave away Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablets to all 5,000 attendees of the show.

We spent a bit of hands on time with new Hasbro toys for Google devices at the show. The Slash gang covering the show also landed free Verizon 4G LTE hotspots on day 2.

Google I/O 2011 show swag was thick, the gang also took home free Chromebooks. Google showed off some cool demos at I/O 2011 with speech input, graphics acceleration, and 3D capability.

Google showed off some cool Arduino-based Android accessories that were very interesting. Google offered new guidelines for devices updates at I/O 2011.