Featured: Our featured stories today include a review of the Acer Aspire S3 (Core i7) as well as a review of Tweetbot for iPhone. Be sure to check them out. In addition, if you’re looking for some early analysis on this month’s upcoming Mobile World Congress, check out this column from our Chris Davies – Apple will dominate MWC and it won’t even be there.

Mobile: AT&T is doing some damage control as it tries to explain away is 2GB throttling of unlimited data plans. Meanwhile, on the rumor mill, we’ve heard a new report on the possibility of a 7-inch iPad being released this year. 2012 could finally be the year that two iPads are released; the iPad 3 is expected to come forth within the next month. Oh, and HTC fans should be please to see this scheduled of Android 4.0 ICS upgrades.

Other Stuff: Hey, here’s something we don’t get to say often – TiVo’s in the news. The company has released a new set of “DirecTiVo” boxes for DirecTV customers. And on a completely separate note, Sony has revealed everything you can expect in a PlayStation Vita First Edition bundle. And if nothing above strikes your interest, this surely will – Steve Jobs FBI file pulled with Freedom of Information Act. Well that’s all for today. Check back tomorrow at the same time for Friday’s evening wrap-up.

The President has chosen to use everyone’s current favorite service for hosting free to listen to and fee to stream Spotify, here sending out his musical love with links directly to the songs themselves. What better way to get in tune with the 2012 Obama Campaign than to listen to the same music the President is listening to? Of more than 500 million playlists on Spotify right this minute, we’re going to go ahead and guess that this one is about to become one of the most popular. Check out the full playlist on Barack Obama’s Tumblr page or head below to see each song with a link directly to your Spotify account – you’ll have to grab one of those, too, if you want to listen.

No Doubt Different People
Earth Wind & Fire Experience feat. Al McKay Allstars Got To Get You Into My Life – (Live)
Booker T. & The MG’s Green Onions – Single/LP Version
Wilco I Got You
The Impressions Keep On Pushing – Single Version
Performed by Jennifer Hudson; Dreamgirls (Motion Picture Soundtrack) Love You I Do
AgesandAges No Nostalgia
Ledisi Raise Up
Sugarland Stand Up
Darius Rucker This
Arcade Fire We Used to Wait
Florence + The Machine You’ve Got The Love
James Taylor Your Smiling Face
REO Speedwagon Roll With The Changes
Raphael Saadiq Keep Marchin’
Noah And The Whale Tonight’s The Kind Of Night
Zac Brown Band Keep Me In Mind
Aretha Franklin The Weight
U2 Even Better Than The Real Thing
Dierks Bentley Home
Sugarland Everyday America
Darius Rucker Learn To Live
Al Green Let’s Stay Together
Electric Light Orchestra Mr. Blue Sky
Montgomery Gentry My Town
Ricky Martin The Best Thing About Me Is You Feat. Joss Stone
Ray LaMontagne You Are The Best Thing
Bruce Springsteen We Take Care Of Our Own

As a reminder – we’ve got so much coverage of Spotify from the first few months it was released here in the United States that it’ll make your eyes bleed. Head to our timeline below to get a great dosage of all the fun as it went down throughout 2011 and up here to 2012.

It’s nice to see two bitter political rivals come together on this issue. Each thinks that having iPhones equipped with the Square dongle, allowing instant credit and debit card payments to be accepted through a proprietary app, is a great way to earn money on the trail. “We’re going to be testing it in Florida tomorrow night to see how it works and then hope to roll it out to the rest of the country,” Romney campaign spokesperson Zac Moffatt told the New York Times.

On the Obama side, there’s actually work underway on a special Obama-themed Square app, which would allow anyone to go out and collect credit card donations on behalf of the president. In other words, campaign donations are going viral, and we all know if there’s one rule in politics, it’s that more money for the candidates is never a bad thing. Right?

[via NY Times]

It was a rather stark and perhaps ironic discussion place for the bill. After all, Obama is the most technologically-active president the United States has ever seen. Tonight’s event, at the behest of the president, was broadcast on YouTube, a site that by its own admission would be forced to shut down the day that SOPA was put into effect, should that day ever come. As such, even though he is a master of political statements, it was pretty obvious what Obama’s true sentiments were about the proposed law.

“I think that it’s going to be possible for us” to go a different route for battling online piracy. It doesn’t have to be SOPA, Obama said. “What I’ve suggested is that both sides–the content side and the server side–come together and work with us to create a system where there are strong protections in place.” In the last few weeks, there have only been lawmakers who were in support of the bill who now oppose it. There have been no Congressmen who had the reverse change of heart.

[via Cnet]

This Google+ hangout is slated for 5:30PM EST and the questions, again, are said to have been picked based solely on their popularity on Google through their pre-set ratings system. There will be a set of five pre-selected American hangout partners joining in on the conversation at some point during or after the questions to add questions of their own as well. This event had previously been slated for 9PM EST but has been moved back to the much more reasonable 5:30PM for all you pre-supper lovers of conversation with the leader of the Western world.

This isn’t the first time Obama will call upon the “Fireside Chat” vibe initiated first by Franklin D Roosevelt, and it won’t be the last. You’ll see an amplified amount of social interactions between the President and the internet now that we’re inching closer and closer to the 2012 elections in which Obama will, indeed, be up for re-election. Now we’ve got to see if that Newt Gingrich lunar base has any salt – that might be a zinger on the other side!

Tune into the +The White House Google+ page at 5:30PM EST to see the whole event go down!

[via Vic Gundotra]

Chopra’s appointment was part of Obama’s “Strategy for American Innovation” initiative, in which he hoped to examine ways that technology would spur innovations to help the government be more efficient in job creation, reducing health care costs, and protecting the homeland.

During Chopra’s nearly three years as the nation’s CTO, he helped design the President’s National Wireless Initiative, developed a nationwide public safety broadband network, and established a set of Internet Policy Principles, among a “dizzying array of accomplishments.”

Although the White House did not specify a reason for Chopra’s departure, the Washington Post reports that he is leaving to pursue a new political career and possibly run for Lieutenant Governor of Virginia.

[via White House]

The White House only joined Google+ on January 20, last Friday, but has already accrued around 17,000 +1′s at time of writing. It has also gathered a fair number of comments, both positive and negative, and we can see Obama’s online interview being a hotly-discussed event.

That the administration has decided to use Google+ is quite the coup for Google, which is still facing questions around antitrust behavior after integrating results from the social network into general search. Google+ broke the 90m user mark last week, a figure which is likely to increase rapidly since the search giant is now pushing sign-ups for all new users.

If you’re keen to ask a question, you’ll need to have it submitted by the end of the day on Saturday, January 28 – that’s this coming Saturday – and hope that it gets sufficient votes to filter up to Obama’s attention. Some of those picked to have their questions answered will also be invited to join the president in the Google+ hangout.

Issa continued by noting that “While I remain concerned about Senate action on the Protect IP Act, I am confident that flawed legislation will not be taken up by this House.” This is, again, a decisive victory for not only those opponents of the bill in Washington, but the masses of internet groups that came out to oppose the bill and its flawed bits allowing companies to shut down webpages at the crack of a whip. You can view the full continuum of events surrounding this situation in our timeline below.

Meanwhile do not think to yourself that this is the end of such legislature. The powers that be will continue to try to move through congress, the house, and the president to bring about a bill that’ll allow big business to censor the internet. It sounds too absurd to be true, but the possibility is there – know it, and fight against it.

[Image via Haibane]

“”Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small” Victoria Espinel, Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator at Office of Management and Budget, Aneesh Chopra, U.S. Chief Technology Officer, and Howard Schmidt, Special Assistant to the President and Cybersecurity Coordinator for National Security Staff wrote in a statement. ”We must avoid creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying architecture of the Internet”"

The response has been tentatively welcomed by privacy advocates, though it’s clear that this isn’t the outright dismissal of either SOPA or PIPA that many have hoped for.

“We appreciate the Administration’s recognition that our ability to innovate, invest, and grow the economy is dependent upon keeping the Internet open and free. We are also pleased that Majority Leader Cantor has assured House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) will not go to the House floor without consensus, which is clearly not the case at this time” Markham Erickson, Executive Director, NetCoalition

High-profile sites have already begun to take advocacy against the acts-in-progress into their own hands. Crowd-sourced site reddit has announced that it will hold an anti-SOPA blackout on January 18, taking the site offline for twelve hours and directing visitors to contact their local US Representatives in order to voice their concerns about the acts. Meanwhile, Wikipedia is apparently considering a similar blackout, and hack-collective Anonymous has said it too will be going dark on January 18 in combined protest. CES-organizers CEA and NVIDIA have also recently thrown their support behind SOPA/PIPA.

The Obama Administration has said it will contact the organizer of a high-profile anti-SOPA petition, along with a random sample of those who signed it, to a conference call to discuss the issue further. Beyond that, it promises to ”host an online event to get more input and answer your questions.”

At the same time, the authors of the SOPA and PIPA acts have each said they will remove sections of the proposed acts that would force ISPs to block foreign sites offering content suspected of infringing US copyright. Both Representative Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican, and Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, have said they will strip the ISP section in SOPA and PIPA respectively, MacWorld reports, though the potential for a DOJ court order to force search engines, advertisers and online payment companies to strip links for foreign sites and stop doing business with them remains.

The new rules going into action will require the two types of vehicles mentioned to improve their fuel efficiency by 5 percent each year between 2013 and 2018. This is to be compared to the 2010 baseline set by the industry, all of this the Presidential administration estimates will save 530 million barrels of oil and a total of $50 billion USD during said period between 2013 and 2018. President Obama made a statement on the situation making it known that unlike recent fuel efficiency standards for passenger cars and light trucks recently announced, new regulations have been more than welcomed by industry officials:

“While we were working to improve the efficiency of cars and light-duty trucks, something interesting happened,” noted President Obama, “We started getting letters asking that we do the same for medium and heavy-duty trucks. They were from the people who build, buy, and drive these trucks. And today, I’m proud to have the support of these companies as we announce the first-ever national policy to increase fuel efficiency and decrease greenhouse gas pollution from medium-and heavy-duty trucks.”

With this announcement, all classes of vehicles in the U.S. must meet some fuel efficiency standard or another inside the next few years. Environmentalists as well as industry officials have hailed this newest set of rules as progressive and good. American Trucking Associations President and chief executive Bill Graves noted the following about the half-hour meeting he and several other industry officials and the President had in the Roosevelt Room before the main announcement:

“Everyone was sort of patting everyone else on the back. … Everybody knows what the expectations are and everyone has lead time to meet those expectations. … I honestly believe one of the reasons we the users have confidence in this rule is we know how competitive these truck manufacturers, engine manufacturers are.” – Bill Graves

Environmentalists noted that the new rules, having been issued jointly by the Transportation Department and the Environmental Protection Agency were a step forward in reducing the nation’s carbon output. This is positive given that according to Vickie Patton, general counsel for the advocacy group Environmental Defense Fund, since the current fleet of U.S. trucks and busses “consumes nearly 2.5 million barrels of oil per day,” and that this new set of regulations would “cut climate pollution by 270 million metric tons.”

These new regulations, according to the Washington Post, will improve fuel efficiency of big-rigs (aka common tractor-trailers) by about 23 percent by 2018, boosting its average miles per gallon from 6 to 7.2 during that same period. Heavy duty trucks will become 15 percent more efficient by 2018 and busses upped by 10 percent according to the same sources.

[via Washington Post]

While VanRoekel worked with the FCC, one of his primary jobs was to redesign their basic website and primary web-based face. Below you’ll be able to see before and after screenshots of the site improved by VanRoekel. He furthermore added a vastly improved commenting system to the new site as well. VanRoekel spoke in April about the new site design noting that it was “built in the cloud, and developed with open source software, and that the new FCC.gov lowers barriers to future development as part of a long-term IT cost-cutting strategy.” VanRoekel had one position between the FCC and the CIO, that being the executive director of Citizen and Organizational Engagement at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

On the other hand Kundra, who served as the nation’s first CIO (that being the Chief Information Officer) started his post as assigned by President Obama on March 5th, 2009, and recently announced that he’d be leaving the job for a new position to take a fellowship at Harvard. Kundra had previously been CTO of the District of Columbia. Kundra’s stressing of visibility for accountability in managing $80 billion in federal IT spending led way to to a Federal IT Dashboard where IT projects are rated by agency and photos of every CIO in charge of said projects are on display.

Some points are being raised on VanRoekel’s appointment to CIO. The first point raised is that VanRoekel donated $50,000 to President Obama’s 2009 inauguration festivities, this similar to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and his wife, Connie Ballmer, plus Bill and Melinda Gates, all of this according to opensecrets.org. In addition, Google’s Eric Schmidt is serving on the White House Office and Technology Policy board along with Craig Mundie, the chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft.

Then there’s Ray Bjorklund, an analyst at FedSources, who notes that VanRoekel “has obviously been well positioned in industry” and that there may be trouble in the future: “You can’t take on major government positions like that and play favorites – that’s not the right thing to do,” said Bjorklund. “Industry may have suspicions, but they may not be well founded suspicions,” he said.

Whether or not there actually is any “playing favorites” or inappropriate selecting of candidates for official government posts from high-up tech posts is up for debate.

[via ComputerWorld]

Leaving the Dublin Embassy today, Obama’s car – known as “The Beast” or “Cadillac One” – got stuck when trying to leave the gates. In the video below – complete with well-timed sound effects from the crowd of Irish onlookers – you can hear the lead car first scrape its underbelly on the hump, and then shortly after The Beast get beached altogether.

President Obama and the First Lady eventually abandoned the car for a second vehicle to continue their tour of Ireland. No word on how heavy The Beast actually is, though each reinforced door is apparently the same weight as a Boeing 757 airplane cabin door.

[via Twitter]

That raid saw one helicopter downed “due to mechanical failure” (although that cause was later denied by senior officials in the briefing) though with no loss of life, as well as the deaths of bin Laden, three adult males and one woman reportedly used as a human shield. The house Bin Laden was using has been described as “purpose built” to shelter an individual, with significant levels of security and a suburban location which dissuaded military forces from using an unmanned drone.

There’s a comprehensive obituary on Osama bin Laden at the Guardian and a timeline of Athar’s tweets at TechCrunch. The full transcript of the Whitehouse press briefing about the raid – much of which is still being treated as confidential – is here, and President Obama’s video address is below.

The town hall meeting will focus on the economy and everyone is encouraged to participate. The White House post reads:

“The President will connect with Americans across the country to discuss the tough choices we must all make to put our economy on a more responsible fiscal path, while still investing in the innovation economy that makes America more competitive.”

If you’d like to get involved and throw your questions in the ring, you can do so at the White House’s Facebook page. They are accepting questions submitted to their Facebook event page and Facebook will get to select from the questions posted. Also make sure to RSVP.

[via Techland]

At the dinner Obama wanted to talk with the CEOs about the “promoting of American innovation, and discuss his commitment to new investments in research and development, education, and clean energy,” said a White House official.

Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg nabbed the prime seats, each flanking the President. The other invitees included: Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Cisco CEO John Chambers, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Genentech Chairman Art Levinson, Stanford University President John Hennessy, and former state controller and venture capitalist Steve Westly.

[via TNW]

Obama compared expanding wireless networks to building highways, railroads, and expanding electricity across the country in earlier decades. Right now, just 65 percent of US homes have broadband internet service. “When it comes to high-speed internet, the lights are still off in one-third of our households.”, he said. Expanding broadband internet will give people in rural areas easier access to information, and opportunities outside their hometowns.

In his state of the union speech, Obama committed 4G high-speed wireless services available to at least 98 per cent of Americans within five years.

Details include:

• A goal to free up 500 MHz of radio spectrum, mainly for mobile broadband. Obama proposes financial incentives to encourage companies and government agencies to release some of their spectrum they hold so it can be auctioned off for this purpose.
• A one-time $5-billion investment in the construction of 4G networks in rural areas. Obama noted that private companies don’t expand there on their own because it isn’t profitable.
• A $3-billion fund to support research, testing and development of “key technological developments” to enable and take advantage of the 4G rollout.
• $10.7 billion to develop and deploy a nationwide interoperable wireless network for public safety and emergency services.
• Using $27.8 billion raised from the proposed auctions of government and commercial spectrum to cut the national deficit by $9.6 billion over the next decade.

[via CBC News]

Take a look at the video below and remember to hang a left back to the first iPad signing back a few weeks ago: Sylvester Cann Captures President Barack Obama in an iPad. Think they’ll get him to sign a Notion Ink Adam?

[Via Belgium iPhone]

Cann was carrying a first-gen iPad equipped with Adobe’s free Ideas app. “You can sign with your finger,” said Cann, who then proceeded to teach Barack Obama about the future by making a tiny mark in the lower right hand corner. The best thing to come of all this? Facebook’s “The swagger & composure of the guy who got the President to sign his iPad”, which you can of course “like.” Take a look at the video below to see it go down, then head on over to the temp side set up by Cann to commemorate the event: The First Presidential iPad Autograph: “I figured, ‘Why not ask?’”

[Via TechPresident]

Rumors and leaks also had their place, with images purporting to be of T-Mobile’s G2 Android phone turning up, and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and cloud-backup plans for Mobile World Congress spilling out.  Meanwhile Apple threw down the litigation gauntlet, threatening serious implications for anyone considered to be impinging on their iPhone IP; it’s a challenge Palm rose to, defending their Pre smartphone and even bringing out an ex-Apple PR to deliver their retort.

Despite manufacturers’ best efforts, though, it’s been all about financial performance this week, and there isn’t much good news around.  In fact Apple are the only real winners this quarter, with Samsung, AMD, Intel, Microsoft, Nokia and Logitech all announcing losses and in many cases job cuts, while Ericsson and Bose also decided to slim down on employees.

You may have noticed a change in the comments system this week, which we’ve implemented in the face of rising spam.  You’ll now have to register – a simple task taking less than two minutes – before you can post your first comment, but since that then gives you posting rights in the SlashGear forums, we don’t think it’s too great a hardship.  See you on the ‘boards!

What makes this Blackberry so special?  Well, for starters, it’s one of the most expensive Blackberry in existence and on top of that, it’s not available for normal folks like you and I.  Pres. Obama’s Blackberry, is actually two Blackberry devices in one, made by General Dynamic.  It’s unclassified PDA that can go out to the Internet to sites like Weather.com or check flights, and with a click of a red button, the device switches over to a classified website granting access to secret emails or secret websites.  Making phone calls comes in two modes; non-secret and secret mode with a click of the red background and it’s a top-secret phone.

While this new device addressed a lot of the security concerns, we’ll have to see how this plays out.  I’m left with questions like does it have a self or manual destruct button in the event of loss or being stolen?  There was no mention of finger print scan for access.  We’ll stay on top of this and get back with you as soon as we hear more.  For now, enjoy CNN’s inside look at the device.