After that, it was CES 2009, and the SlashGear team decamped to Las Vegas to cover the best-known consumer electronics show on the calendar.  The impact of the recession has certainly made its mark on CES, with what looked to be a lower attendee turnout and several booth cancellations.  Headline gadgets were also fewer and further between, though there were still a few notable announcements.

Surprise introduction was the Palm Pre, a new smartphone coupled with a new platform, webOS.  Despite getting thrown out of the press launch during our liveblog, we still managed to bring you the first images of the device on the net.  The QWERTY-equipped capacitive touchscreen slider is set to hit Sprint in the first half of 2009; make sure to check out our hands-on Pre report, Sprint & Palm Q&A, and visit Pre Community for more details.

A long-rumored netbook came to fruition too this week, in the shape of the Sony VAIO P.  Following the company’s usual path of no-compromise design and little accomodation for aching wallets, the VAIO P is an expensive ($899+) and interesting addition to the ultraportable space.  SlashGear is one of a very small number of sites with a VAIO P of our own; check out our first impressions here, and expect plenty more on this Digital Lifestyle PC very soon.  In fact I’m currently writing this Week in Review on the P, with only minimal squinting.

Elsewhere, we caught up with the latest version of Nokia’s N97 smartphone – which we’re looking forward to spending more time with at Mobile World Congress next month – and sat down with Creative to discuss their innovative Zii processor.  iRiver’s curious WAVE HOME reminded us that just when we think we can predict the company, they surprise us, and ASUS pulled a number of interesting devices – including the Eee PC T91 Tablet – out of the bag.

Elsewhere in the touchscreen space, OQO’s new Model 2+ – complete with OLED touchscreen and integrated worldwide 3G support – certainly endeared itself, and we’re looking forward to getting our hands on a review unit.  On an even smaller scale, it’s good to hear that the LG GD910 watch phone is headed for production.

Apple may have not introduced much hardware, but that doesn’t stop them influencing others’ design.  One of the more obviously “MacBook inspired” items at the show has been MSI’s X-Slim X320; make sure to check out our comparison photoshoot with the MacBook Air.

That’s just a small slice of our CES coverage, so if you want to catch up with all the good stuff from the show click on the CES 2009 tag.  We’ll be rounding up any remaining content that we may have missed from our memory cards in the coming days.

Finally, we have a new addition to the SlashGear family in the shape of Shawn Farner, who joined our editorial staff on Monday.  Shawn is a rabid social-media junkie as well as a tech-addict, and we’re hoping you’re finding his content as interesting to read as we are.

According to Apple, the battery should be good for about 1,000 cycles.  It is estimated that, at 200 cycles per year, it would take approximately five years for your battery to need replaced.  It’s likely Apple is hoping that, in five years’ time, the itch to buy a new laptop will be too much for you to bear and battery life won’t even be an issue.

If you’re the type that buys a new MacBook every time one comes out, this battery issue won’t really affect you.  If you plan on making the MBP last a few years or if you experience battery issues, you can head to any Apple retail store or Apple-authorized dealer to get your MacBook Pro’s battery replaced.

[via Gizmodo]

iTunes is the number 1 channel for music in the United States and will be changing three things for 2009. The first of which will be pricing on a single song basis. There will be new $0.69 songs with a second tier of $1.29 songs. Apparently music companies are asking for more choices in the pricing of their songs. New pricing will take affect in April.

Starting today songs purchased through iTunes will be DRM free, meaning there will be no protection allowing users to transfer music to other computers. Not only that but the media files will be of much higher quality. What is there for people who have already downloaded music? Now you can take earlier songs and upgrade them to a higher quality DRM free version. The third announcement is directly related to the iPhone. Now the Music Store can be accessed over 3G and Wi-Fi rather than just Wi-Fi.  This service will start today so users can get downloading on the go immediately.

Some good news comes to us as many professionals do not like the glare, unfortunately the anti-glare option is an extra $50. Your all wandering about the included ports, there will be 3 USB, a mini displayport, gigabit ethernet, firewire 800, digital audio in/out and expresscard port. As to be expected the glass keypad will include four-finger gesture support.

On the inside New Core 2 Duo processors, up to 8GB RAM and NVIDIA graphics with discrete option. You also have the option of having a 256GB SSD if you wish. When speaking about the battery Phil said, “we wanted our longest lasting batter, but we wanted it thin and light.” Phil went on to say, “We’ve designed a battery that will last 8 hours on a charge and can be charged 1000 times.” The reason Apple decided to go along with an integrated battery was because removable batteries take up a lot of space and by making it non-removable, they could put a 40-percent bigger battery in the same space.

The batteries are a block rather than cylindrical cells and made with lithium polymer tech that extends life by 3x compared to rivals. There is also an intelligent chip in the battery that monitors and adjusts current allowing for 1,000 recharges of up to 5 years. The 8 hours of battery life comes from using the 9400M graphics. You will get 7 hours with the NVIDIA 9600GT. For one configuration $2,799 you will get you 2.66GHz CPU, 4GB RAM, 320GB hard-drive.

New chart animations can pan in as if they were being moved from a crane. There is also a new Keynote app for the iPhone and iPod touch, connects wirelessly to control your Mac during a presentation. With options to be held vertically or horizontally you will get two different views; when held vertically it shows the slide; horizontally it shows two slides, and you can flick between them to transition.

Also added to iWork there is a new dynamic outline that you can start planning a document in straight away. With Pages you can better organize text and images with over 40 new themes.  In Numbers 09 they’ve been listening to what the customer wants and adding new features accordingly. Apple has added new table categories, plus 250 functions that can add mouseover info and colors. There are also new charts, with mixed charts now possible, with trend lines and multiple axis.

Apple is also readying a beta called iWork.com, which is a shared document service that will collaborate, review and edit documents for you online. You can use it to share documents with yourself, so if you travel you can access them elsewhere.

The second addition, “Places” is an advanced geo-tagging service for photos.  Places works with standalone cameras that have GPS, together with the iPhone’s camera. This service will automatically dig up GPS data on your photo and with the iPhone will provide latitude and longitude data to identify that you were near a landmark like say the Eifel Tower.

iPhoto has a vast database of thousands of well known locations. There is also integrated Facebook and Flickr support, to export all that location and person data. Also there are new themes for showing your photos with all new matching music. One amazing addition is the travel book system, which will group photos based on the location in which they were taken. iMovie also got a bit of tweaking. Users can now edit in real-time, stabilize a clip, slow it down and make it look aged.

Phil moved on to announce the new additions to GaradgeBand 09. Perhase the largest addition to the software is the new “Learn to Play” feature, which as the name implies teaches you how to play guitar in a fun and interactive way. Lessons are given with a video instructor in real HD video along with the fretboard of the guitar just below the video.  There is also a keyboard-teaching feature for those who would rather learn the keyboard. Celebrity lessons are provided by such names as John Fogerty, guitarist from Fallout Boy, Sting, Sara McLaughlin, Ryan Tedder and Norah Jones on keyboard with plenty more to be added soon.

These lessons may be some of the most interactive software lessons out there. The lessons will be quite expensive so only those most dedicated will actually use them. Each lesson will be $4.99 each! For that price you can take lessons from an instructor. iLife 09 will be included on all new Macs with a release in January. Upgrading will be $79, with the family pack for $99.

Among the new products rumored, there’s a 17-inch unibody MacBook Pro with an integrated high-capacity battery and a refresh of the Mac mini line, with dual HDD option and all round improved performance.  Mobile devices have also been tipped, with an iTablet iPod touch, with a 7 to 9-inch touchscreen, and an iPhone nano both suggested.

So join us over at the Liveblog – http://live.slashgear.com/ – for all the news and announcements as they happen.  We’ll also have full coverage of whatever’s announced on the SlashGear front page.

Despite what many people have seemed to think, Jobs’ is not on his deathbed or anything of the like. In fact, the Apple CEO has taken to the web and sent out a letter to the Apple Community in order to clear up the rumors and to hopefully let people focus on Apple products tomorrow at Macworld and not his health.

Check out what Steve Jobs said for himself, below:

Letter From Apple CEO Steve Jobs

Dear Apple Community,

For the first time in a decade, I’m getting to spend the holiday season with my family, rather than intensely preparing for a Macworld keynote.

Unfortunately, my decision to have Phil deliver the Macworld keynote set off another flurry of rumors about my health, with some even publishing stories of me on my deathbed.

I’ve decided to share something very personal with the Apple community so that we can all relax and enjoy the show tomorrow.

As many of you know, I have been losing weight throughout 2008. The reason has been a mystery to me and my doctors. A few weeks ago, I decided that getting to the root cause of this and reversing it needed to become my #1 priority.

Fortunately, after further testing, my doctors think they have found the cause — a hormone imbalance that has been “robbing” me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy. Sophisticated blood tests have confirmed this diagnosis.

The remedy for this nutritional problem is relatively simple and straightforward, and I’ve already begun treatment. But, just like I didn’t lose this much weight and body mass in a week or a month, my doctors expect it will take me until late this Spring to regain it. I will continue as Apple’s CEO during my recovery.

I have given more than my all to Apple for the past 11 years now. I will be the first one to step up and tell our Board of Directors if I can no longer continue to fulfill my duties as Apple’s CEO. I hope the Apple community will support me in my recovery and know that I will always put what is best for Apple first.

So now I’ve said more than I wanted to say, and all that I am going to say, about this.

Steve

Poor Microsoft; in fact the only real news out of Seattle this week was an explanation as to why all the Zune 30 PMPs turned into lemmings at New Year.  Meanwhile, two monstrous notebooks – either of which could play havoc with your back if you forget to bend at the knees – got some hands-on playtime, in the shape of the Lenovo W700ds and the HP Voodoo Firefly concept.

LG decided it couldn’t wait until this coming week to reveal what fun it had planned for 2009, and so we got an eyeful of the LH95 “world’s thinnest” LCD, a Trumotion 480Hz LCD panel and a 24-inch LCD with a million-to-one contrast ratio.  Elsewhere, there’s interesting movement at MSI in the shape of the U115 Hybrid netbook, while ASUS’ S121 12.1-inch netbook also broke cover.  They’ll go up against Sony’s VAIO P netbook, of which we saw more photos and found out more details – including pricing – this past week.  Finally, for those with slightly more unusual tastes, OQO announced their Model 2+ UMPC with an OLED touchscreen and Intel Atom CPU.

Of course, this week sees two stalwarts of the tech calendar play out their usual head-to-head, as Macworld 2009 and CES 2009 both kick off.  SlashGear will be attending both, running our traditional liveblog of the Apple keynote on Tuesday morning – join us at 9am PST at http://live.slashgear.com – and then filling the rest of the week with the hottest tech from CES.  You can keep track using the CES 2009 tag; enjoy!

That means along with the expected increase in battery life – no estimates are given, but the tipsters are saying “much longer” - there’s also the headache of replacing the pack after it begins to lose performance.  It’s a familiar issue to those with iPods, iPhones and the MacBook Air, all of which have internal batteries that Apple have to replace, not the owner.

The prediction is that the new 17-inch unibody MacBook Pro will get its unveil at Macworld 2009 on Tuesday morning, complete with a gloss-finish display (and the retirement of the plastic 13-inch MacBook).  SlashGear will be liveblogging the whole event, so join us at 9am PST at http://live.slashgear.com/ for all the details!

Want more of CES and Macworld?  Find out how after the cut…

As well as our regular event coverage, we’ll also be bringing you pre-event pictures and video at http://www.kyte.tv/slashgear.  Back in October, at the MacBook and MacBook Pro launches, SlashGear readers got to see exclusive pre- and post-event video courtesy of our live uploads; we’re planning on even more of that over the next two weeks.

We’re keen to make sure you find out exactly what you want to know from CES 2009 and Macworld, so please get in touch with any special requests.  We can’t promise to cover everything, but we’ll certainly try!

It has become very clear that Apple has made an effort to move into the web-based application market with the release of the MobileMe extensive Mail and Address Book applications, which are entirely web-based. There has also previously been talk of an entire “Webkit-based” platform after Apple adopted the SroutCore framework used in MobileMe.

Developers have constantly been pushing the boundaries of what web-based applications are capable of. While this sis still just another MacWorld rumor, it is a very interesting concept for such an application. Will the push to move applications to the web help or hinder the progress and overall users experience of these applications?

Again, just like the last of many from the “insider sources”; it’s a rumor at best, TUAW believed that the Mac mini will get on stage next week at Macworld. Details are thin but they expected three major changes :

Say hello to a black aluminium Mac mini

“lip” design similar to Time capsule to provide cooling, back vents are goner.

Internal optical drive will be SATA based, now you can swap it out with a secondary SATA storage.

Shameless plug : We’ll be there to bring you live coverage, so make sure to check us out at http://live.slashgear.com

So unless there are new updates next week on who makes what from which contract. Here’s the new standing : Foxconn and Catcher Technology are in bed to supply the magnesium-aluminum alloy chassis while Foxconn will seek partnership in cooling module from Auras Technology. A cooling module? Could that possible hint a change in current-fan based cooling system?

In any case, we will find out in a week there will be a new iMac or just another rumor. Just a reminder that Slashgear will be bringing MacWorld conference live coverage. Be sure to check us out at http://live.slashgear.com

“Apple is reaching more people in more ways than ever before, so like many companies, trade shows have become a very minor part of how Apple reaches its customers. The increasing popularity of Apple’s Retail Stores, which more than 3.5 million people visit every week, and the Apple.com website enable Apple to directly reach more than a hundred million customers around the world in innovative new ways.” Apple said in the release.

This year’s Macworld takes place at Moscone Center in San Francisco on January 5 through 9.  Schiller’s keynote will be given at 9:00 AM on Tuesday January 6.  SlashGear will be there to bring you live coverage, so make sure to look for full coverage of the event at http://live.slashgear.com.

Gottheil goes on to say that this device will provide users with basic functions such as web access, word processing software, email and media playing all at a much more affordable price. Apple aims to give users a pick up and go experience with an easier learning curve that leaves less room for questions and problems. The new device will have an optional online backup service that allows users to completely backup and restore the device when needed.

I for one am glad to see Apple providing their products in all areas of the market for those who prefer the use of a Mac to a PC. We are sure that the new netbook device will be available about midyear 2009 with a $599 pricetag. With all the recent goodies Apple has brought to us this year, we can’t wait to see how they will change the world of netbooks.

The second model, meanwhile, will be priced at around $700, with a 2.3GHz Core 2 Duo processor and NVIDIA graphics as found in the MacBook Pro and certain MacBook models.  Both will have a Mini DisplayPort video connector, a minimum of 2GB of RAM and at least 160GB hard-drive space.  Blu-ray is still not expected, given Steve Jobs’ previous dismissal of the format.

Apple have previously insisted that their “holiday line-up is set”, which did little to dismiss suggestions that at least one new model would be coming early in 2009.  The Mac Mini has been the forerunner in the speculation, given its long-unchanged hardware and continued sales success.