Groups such as Filesonic are cutting out file-sharing publicly to stopper up Megaupload-related mishaps. Conspiracists have an idea on why Megaupload has been targeted. Megaupload’s CEO’s home has been raided. Meanwhile the supreme court has ruled warrantless GPS tracking illegal. Pirate sharing websites have upgraded to 3D. A judge has ruled that the Fifth Ammendment does not cover hard drives. There’s a battle going on involving the ex-Megaupload users and the FBI. And Dotcom has been denied bail. Guy Fawkes has been called upon again to defend piracy, this time in Poland parliament.

We got a Spectrum by LG in the house and have reviewed it in full. The Samsung Galaxy S III has been tipped, confirmed, and considered for release at Mobile World Congress 2012. Samsung’s iPhone burn ad series continues. We’ve been slapped in the face. We’ve got a review of the ASUS Transformer Prime with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. We’ve got an unboxing and hands-on of the DROID RAZR MAXX with a review on the way. We’ve got a fight going on between Speck, Logitech, and Cygnett for the iPad 2. We got a hands-on look at Qualcomm AllJoyn.

Star Wars: The Old Republic gets a major update. You might want to get your tissues out again because Diablo III is getting more pre-release tweaks and a producer change. Good luck seeing that inside the first couple of quarters here in 2012. Saddest days!

There’s a brand new Xbox 720 in the works with an AMD 6000 GPU and an inability to play used games. A Windows 8 based Kinect notebook has been spotted. Both Microsoft Xbox Live and Steam are coming to iOS and Android. Nintendo will be releasing the Wii U fabulously. We’ve got a review of the V-MODA Limited Edition Crossfade LP2 super deluxe over-ear headphones. We went hands-on with a Mercedes-Benz DICE interior concept as well as the new Mercedes-Benz mbrace2.

Facebook Timeline is now fully live and mandatory. Wikipedia is in works to become the world’s free mobile website. Philip Berne wrote a lovely column about Booth Babes. Chemists have created the first envelopes for artificial life.

Evi turns up as a surprise hit in the Siri alternative world. Over 350,000 iBooks textbooks were downloaded in the first three days they existed. Half a million iPhone 4S users downloaded and loaded the brand new jailbreak that broke this week. Apple’s secret packaging testing room has been revealed. More iPads than HP PCs have been sold in Q1 2012. Some fabulous new iPhone 5 specs have been leaked by a Foxconn worker. Chris Davies calls Apple TV an embarrassment while Don Reisinger spoke on what Apple TV needs to become more than a hobby – he also noted how he’d much rather have an Xbox 360.

We disprove Lytro on iPhones. On how well Nokia did this past quarter, Chris Davies noted that they bought time, That Clock Is Ticking. In the Windows Phone world we’ve got a Nokia Lumia 710 review while the much more fantastically spec’d Nokia Lumia 900 comes closer and closer to an LTE UK release. There’s also a Nokia Lumia 910 coming up soon as well. The 2012 version of MIX for Microsoft Developers has been nixed for the year. So has BlizzCon 2012. There’s also that teeny tiny Raspberry $25 PC edging closer and closer to reality. Alienware’s 2012 lineup has been revealed.

Financial results came in from Verizon and the folks at Apple (complete with the most fantastic quarter for iPhone EVER.) There’s a few Nokia financial results plus Netflix dropped their numbers down and AT&T jumped in too. Nvidia let loose their earnings as well.

For CES 2012 collections, we’ve got the almighty Ultrabook Round-up at the head of things, then a Smart TV Round-up to keep your displays wishing they had some more intuitive bits of software behind them. The tag team of Tablet Round-up and Smartphone Round-up brings the mobile to the party, and our gigantic Best of CES 2012 will let you in on the top excellence. I also invite you to come with me on a journey through the week with your humble narrator and his gear (my backpack included) in a column called My CES 2012.

Our week this week then started with an announcement of sorts from Microsoft that Skype on Windows Phone would finally be hitting the public – soon – and it may be their wild card, so says Chris Davies. Meanwhile there’s a brand new Nissan self-healing iPhone case on the streets, and Android lovers had a field day with Steve Wozniak’s comments on what he thought was better than iOS in the Google mobile operating system.

In hacking news there was one whole heck of a lot to be had, starting with the Zappos break-in, moving on to the 6pm break-in, and our subsequent PSA SlashGear 101: Basic Password Security. We saw $6.7 million USD stolen in a cyber bank robbery. We then started relatively early in taking on SOPA and PIPA with an explanatory post by the name of SlashGear 101: SOPA and PIPA explained in plain English. We also took a very clear stand in SOPA and PIPA are the Wrong Way to Tackle Piracy and the video by Clay Shirky for TED tells it like it is as well. As it turns out, the Internet won and SOPA and PIPA were delayed indefinitely.

The next bill by the main SOPA sponsor is 1981, and is much scarier.

The next hammer to fall was Megaupload being knocked out amid piracy indictments. In response to this, Anonymous DDoS attacked the Department of Justice, the RIAA, the MPAA, and Universal Music. The Megaupload team spoke out, followed by Anonymous becoming more vocal on #OpMegaUpload.

Apple was the first tech company to join the Fair Labor Association, the “Icons” Steve Jobs action figure was completely axed, and it’s looking like Scott Forstall is aiming for the CEO spot soon. There’s been a bit of a tip that the iPad 3 will come February while the iPad 2 remains on sale. There’s another rumor out there that says the iPad 2S is up next while the iPad 3 gets pushed back.

Another tablet out there this month that will be no competition for the iPad at all whatsoever was the Hongpaiyihao Chinese “government official” slate which costs more than any other tablet on the market and has next to nothing appealing in or on it. A more real competitor is continuing to take shape in the Windows 8 Tablet space, Microsoft releasing hardware requirements for manufacturers to start the year off right. The Acer Ultrabook lineup is also set to take off.

The education world was hit with a few announcements from Apple with iBooks 2 and textbooks, the price point of $14.99 for textbooks, and iBooks Author – free for download. We got hands-on with iBooks Author, iTunes U, and iBooks 2. You can get the whole Apple education roundup at once. Also read up on what Philip Berne has to say in The Problem with Tech and Teaching.

Microsoft also came correct with an early preview of System Center 2012 which will be hitting your private cloud sooner than later! Michael Crider reviewed the new HP Folio 13. Alienware revealed the fabulous Alienware X51 crossover device. The folks at Scientology are creating a new Super Power Building with their followers’ cash, the fifth oldest tree in the world The Senator spontaneously combusted, and the Costa Concordia cruise ship fell on its side and went halfway under off the Tuscan coast. You can see it from outer space or from under the sea.

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich is being pushed to tablets. BlackBerry got told by Chris Davies in a column called RIM should think Type not Touch for the new PlayBook. Samsung is walking a narrow road with their update to Ice Cream Sandwich with their Galaxy devices, keeping with a Value Pack instead of a full upgrade for older models. Samsung is also working on a bada / Tizen merge that’s not yet final. Microsoft and ZTE gave each other a high five and us a preview hands-on with the ZTE Tania running Windows Phone. Meanwhile there was a strange silence from Microsoft on Windows Phone in their quarterly financial results announcement.

There was a bit of a change as AT&T amped up their prices and T-Mobile followed suit. The social network Facebook updated its Timeline to spread to everyone. Kodak went bankrupt. Resident Evil 6 was announced. Don Reisinger columned about the next PlayStation and how HBO Go is the next Netflix.

Music keeps getting more and more serious in the mobile realm, especially with iPad, starting with the Auria 48-track recording system app. There’s a set of three Behringer iPad mixers out there now, and the Akai MPC Fly turns your iPad into a portable beats center. The Numak IDJ PRO DJ Controller sits your iPad at the center of all the fun. Gotta catch em all!

In space there’s been a few different items – NASA has two Grails in orbit around the moon, first of all. As for when the world is going to end, we’ve created a 2012 Doomsday debunked: a NASA rundown guide for everyone fearful of the end inside this year. We got to peek at the falling Russian space probe courtesy of an amateur photographer.

We ran down our top five posts of the entirety of 2011, this list including some real oddities, to be sure. Michael Crider reviewed the HP ENVY 15. We’ve got hands-on with both the HP Omni 27 and the Pavilion HPE h9 Phoenix gaming PC. The HP Folio 13 is coming up soon as well. Check out the tiniest of reviews, also, for the AAXA P4 Pico Projector courtesy of Cory Gunther.

There’s a column by Philip Berne which tells all of you travelers out there to Stop Whining and Turn Off Your Phone. Another column written in the past week, this time directed at Google, has your humble narrator saying Android updates should never have been offered. A column by Chris Davies demanded answers from the creators of BlackBerry: Licensing BB10 is desperation; Then again, RIM’s desperate.

The Meizu MX Android smartphone has been launched in China. The master developer and hacker by the name of Koush has launched a mobile internet tethering app undetectable by carriers. We rounded up our Android tablets through 2011. Similarly, we had a post made up only of iPad 2 news through 2011. Then there’s the bootloader unlock and Ice Cream Sandwich update information drop for the ASUS Transformer Prime. The Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich update will come with rules for manufacturers. Google has a Nexus tablet coming soon. Apple will possibly be releasing two iPad units inside 2012.

Windows Phone got its Siri alternative in an app called Ask Ziggy. Android developers have also upped the ante with an Iris and CheCha teamup. Much in the same way everyone loves Siri, your humble narrator’s column about Snoop Dogg let you know why there’s always a king. SOPA has been creating such a fury that Nintendo and Sony have dropped support for the bill officially. Meanwhile there’s a bug running around Facebook stealing all your passwords.

Apple is prepping a late January event in NYC, likely having to do with book publishing or smart televisions. That said, we asked you a million dollar question: If Apple outs a $300 iPad, will you be able to resist? Another big question asked over the past week: Are you awesome enough to work for Stephen Hawking? Also Kodak went bankrupt.

Velocity Micro dropped information about a projector and Ice Cream Sandwich tablets, very likely to be showing up at CES. Sony Ericsson teased what’s possibly the Arc HD, and had a leak of a device known as the Pepper. Razer has teased a Project Fiona for July 10th. Logitech will have a device known as the Cube. Corning revealed they’d be letting loose Gorilla Glass 2.

As for CES coverage beyond that, you’ve got several options. You can hit up the handfulls of leaks post, the post made as a guide for beginners, and such guides for individual categories as our smart TV guide, and of course, Stop Whining and Go To Las Vegas. Also you should probably check out how Don Reisinger called the Death of CES – see if you agree. Our entire coverage of the events can be found inside the [CES 2012 portal] if you please!

We started out with a genuine Don Reisinger article all about the future of Apple vs Samsung in TVs. Apple used Santa for Siri. The company known as Fusion Garage implodes. Eric Schmidt teased a Nexus tablet in the next 6 months. The Galaxy Nexus went Ninja. Officials stalled on SOPA.

We started out very own Lumia 800 giveaway! Tips led to Google Terminator glasses. Samsung promised Bada 2.0 for 2012 The AT&T T-Mobile merger was dropped entirely. We reviewed the DROID XYBOARD accessories as well as the XYBOARD 8.9 and 10.1. Samsung said GSII and Note for ICS in Q1, 2012. The MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic was officially launched. Apple purchased Anobit for Flash Memory futures.

The PlayStation Vita was apologized for. Sony detailed ICS updates for XPERIA. Google used Santa for Nexus. Microsoft said CES 2012 would be their last. The AMD Radeon HD 7970 Series GPU was announced. We did a lovely review of the tiny Pogoplug Mobile, as well as the TP-LINK TL-SC4171G Wi-fi IP camera.

Steve Jobs won a Grammy. We discussed why Google+ works, for now. We reviewed the Verizon Galaxy Nexus. We reviewed the Three Wi-fi hub XTE MF10. Don Reisinger explained why he considers Netflix 2011′s Biggest Loser. We reviewed the Philips goLITE BLU Energy Light. Xerox PARC founder Jacob Goldman passed away.

We wished you a Happy Holidays. We guided you towards a Galaxy S II for Christmas. Avi Greengart noted how Apple’s Grand Central Station Store is and will be the Future of Retail. There very well may have been a leak of the Galaxy S III. We let you know what to do with your crappy Android tablet. Chris Davies instructed you on Geek Speak and Holiday Headaches.

LG updated us on their Android ICS schedule. Nokia showed off a fancy nametag. We showed you what to buy for your new iPad 2 or your new Android device. Windows Phone’s Market hit 50k applications. Samsung changed their mind several times on their Galaxy line ICS update schedule. There was a tip that said iPhone 5 would be coming and that water was wet. Don Reisinger let us know why he wanted Video Games for Christmas. The CyanongenMod team released info on their ICS launcher.

We reviewed the year 2011 in Android Developers. A tip dropped about two new iPads in January 2012. We got really super mad about Twitter kids. Verizon was down a whole lot this month. We got our own look at the Intel 32nm Medfield SoC reference tablet. We were assured anew that the Raspberry Pi $25 USD computer was on schedule for January. Comscore assured us that Android and iOS were still on top. Stanford University revealed bits of their massive Apple archive. The 2012 Chevrolet Sonic had missing brake pads.

Windows had an emergency patch released. China decided they’d be heading to space. Don Reisinger told us all about 32-37-inch Apple TVs. We heard about a possible LG/Intel collaboration at CES. The Acer Iconia Tab A700 was revealed to possibly be coming with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. A shadow joke of an app Siri for Android appeared on the market. An iPad 3 Retina Display appeared in a Korean forum. Philip Berne let us know that it was Time to Upgrade his Parents. We got our hands on a brand new HP ENVY 15. Philip Berne let us know his New Year’s Meta-Tech Resolutions. And of course, we wished you a Happy New Year’s!

Specs on the Nikon D4 DSLR camera surfaced this week and they look really good. The camera is rumored to have a 16.2MP sensor and native ISO up to 102,400. Word surfaced that the FBI might be using Carrier IQ software on handsets for low enforcement purposes. The FBI refused a Freedom of Information Act request and accidentally revealed that it might be using the software for investigations.

Modern Warfare 3 has set a record with $1 billion in total sales this week. That massive sales number was hit in only 17 days beating out the flick Avatar to reach the $1 billion mark. MIT has invented camera that is able to shoot photos at a trillion frames per second. The sensor is so fast that it can photograph the propagation of light.

CERN announced that is has found “tantalizing hints” of Higgs boson particles at the LHC. Papers outlining the discovery are expected by the end of January. The NTSB is proposing that all use of mobile phones be banned while driving. That would include the use of hands free devices which the NTSB says are just as dangerous as holding your phone.

American Airlines has received approval to use the iPad in the cockpit of aircraft during all phases of flight. The iPad has the flight manual and digital charts with weight savings compared to paper charts helping to save lots of money for the airline. Microsoft has been tipped to purchase the Nokia smartphone division in 1H 2012. I still don’t see that being a mix for success.

A proposal for redesigning the HP brand has surfaced from a company called Moving Brands. One of the things you can see in the proposal is a new logo that looks like straight lines, but reads HP. We went hands-on with the Prada phone by LG 3.0 this week after the fancy smartphone went official. Chris Davies was a bit “meh” on the smartphone after his time with the device.

We put up our review of the Motorola Droid Xyboard 10.1 this week. The tablet doesn’t seem like much of an upgrade on the Xoom that is already available. The Facebook Timeline went official all around the world this week. The Timeline allows you to set up a chronological outline of your world.

Remember that throwable Panoramic Ball camera from a while back? More details were released and the company is seeking investors to bring the device to market. Astronomers discovered a massive gas cloud that was being sucked into a black hole in the center of our galaxy. The cloud has more mass than Earth and will provide a glimpse into how matter reacts near a black hole.

Senator Al Franken grilled the FBI director on the use of Carrier IQ software this week. This came after hints early in the week that the FBI might be using it for law enforcement. An Iranian scientist bragged this week that Iran bagged a NATO drone using a GPS spoof. The Iranians tricked the drone into simply landing where they wanted it.

Davies noted this week that you had better be sure you like Timeline before you activate it. Once you have Timeline if you don’t like it there is no going back. Thanks for reading and have a Merry Christmas!

One small town in Texas has been so hard hit by the drought and the heat this summer that it has been forced to take extreme measures for water. The town is installing a recycling station that will filter urine for drinking water. The Droid Bionic was unveiled in some photos showing all the hardware. The device will support 4G and has a dual-core processor.

IBM/NCSA has abandoned the petascale supercomputer project that was in the works dubbed “Blue Waters.” The reason for abandoning the project was unexpected costs and complexities. Sales of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 were blocked in Europe this week. The sales of the Samsung tablet were halted after Apple alleged that it was infringing on its IP rights.

A very cool and officially licensed Star Trek theme park is heading to Aqaba, Jordan. The theme park will be part of the Red Sea Astrarium and the King of Jordan is investing $1.5 billion of his own loot into the project. Anonymous vowed to destroy Facebook on November 5th early in the week. Facebook declined to comment on the threat.

Facebook launched a group messaging app this week called Facebook Messenger. The app allows the user to chat with all their friends and access the Facebook inbox. Apple hit a major milestone this week becoming the world’s largest company. Apple passed Exxon Mobile as the largest market value company.

Amazon launched a new Kindle web app this week that is aimed at the iPad user. The app is web based rather than a traditional app to get Amazon around sharing money with Apple. The cool Sifteo interactive blocks are now up for pre-order. The digital blocks are used for all sorts of games and sell for $145 for a three-cube starter pack.

Windows Phone 7 Mango is coming on September 1 according to reports from supposed inside sources. The only hint that Microsoft has given for the official launch was this fall. Anonymous has disavowed the Facebook attach threat. Some details surfaced that claim Anonymous wants to fight for users not against them. Seriously?

A new hack using Kinect surfaced that has the motion detecting sensor controlling a stuffed monkey. The monkey makes the same moves the person in front of the sensor makes. A lot of people were not happy to find out this week that their phone numbers are being shared. In fact, the feature is not new and your phone number has been shared by Facebook for a long time.

A new robot satellite with the ability to toss space junk down into the atmosphere where it will burn up has been announced. The robot would help to clean up the space around our planet to remove all the junk that could threaten satellites that are in use. A letter that leaked from inside AT&T may hurt the chances of the company completing its merger with T-Mobile. The leaked letter shows that AT&T plans to cover 80% of the country with its LTE network and covering more was too costly but the T-Mobile purchase is more expensive than just building out its own network. Thanks for reading this week’s edition, see you next time!

Researchers into new methods of networking have discovered a way to use LED lighting to distribute full HD films and other content to computers. The LED lights are used as a wireless networking solution that delivers up to 800 Mbit/s download speeds. Anonymous is apparently testing a new attack tool called #RefRef. The tool was apparently tested on Pastebin and a 17-second test shut down the website for 42 minutes.

Last week Britain signaled that it intended to make it legal to copy a CD or DVD by owners. The intent is to allow the moving of a digital copy of the music or film to computers or other digital devices. A rumor surfaced that the iPhone 5 was already sent to carriers for testing. The rumors are still pointing to a launch of the new smartphone in September or October.

Intel Ultrabooks were supposed to hit the market at under $1000. Insiders are saying that the new machines are being sabotaged by Intel greed with a bill of materials that forces the machines to sell for more than Intel says they should. Chris spent some hands on time with the Blackberry Torch 9810 and shot a video of the device for us to check out. He was concerned that there may not be enough different here to help Blackberry get back to where it once was in the market.

Android Ice Cream Sandwich will be tied up with Texas Instruments as the chipset reference platform .TI has offered up a photo that they will be using to promote the tie up and it’s cute. The interesting bit is that we expect to see some awesome chipsets form TI next year. MotoActive surfaced last week showing off a cool Android watch for the athletic folks out there. The little watch appears to have a 1-inch screen and offer all sorts of details on your run or workout along with media playing.

The FCC went out and measured the actual interent speeds around the country and offered the data this week. The survey found Verizon’s fiber connectivity the fastest and Cablevision was the slowest. ComScore’s latest numbers show that there are now 25 million Google+ users around the world. Google has only offered that it has 10 million registered users so far.

The Juno space probe that will head to Jupiter will take with it three different LEGO minifigs. The minifigs are likenesses of Galileo, the pagan god Jupiter, and Juno the sister of Jupiter. Microsoft announced that it had invited Google to bid with it Novel patents. Google denied the claim and then Microsoft offered up emails to show they did in fact invite Google.

A new study that surfaced recently claims that our moon may be the result of two moons that collided and formed one. The theory explains why the near and far sides of our moon are so vastly different. The Nyko Zoom for Kinect hit pre-order at Amazon and other retailers last week. This is the accessory for the Kinect that shortens the distance you need to be from the Kinect to play.

The Skype app for Android was updated last week. The update brought with it support for video calling on several new handsets. Rue reviewed the Motorola Droid 3 smartphone late in the week. She liked the phone and the main quibble was that the phone didn’t support 4G.

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance orbiter has found evidence of liquid water on the surface of Mars. NASA says the black streaks it thinks to be water only show up in spring and summer. A hacker at the Black Hat conference has shown a way to hack the wireless connectivity for insulin pumps. The hack has the potential to do harm to the diabetic wearing the pump.

Google’s robot car that needs no driver got into an accident last week. The accident was blamed on the human though; the car was being driven manually when the accident occurred. An awesome old school sit down Outrun arcade game was hacked into a real driving game. The arcade game was put onto a chassis and can really take to the roads with eh driver watching the screen to see where he is going. Thanks for reading this week’s edition, see you next time!

AT&T is said to be getting the staff at its stores ready for the debut of the iPhone 5. Reports claim that workers are being told to be ready for a lot of foot traffic in September. RIM has announced that 2,000 of its workers will be let go. The smartphone maker is having a very hard time competing against Android and the iPhone on the current market.

One of the coolest mods I have seen in a long time is this Wall-E robot toy that was hacked to be a real robot. The bot has a camera for an eye and object tracking. Netflix has announced that it will get the exclusive rights to DreamWorks films for streaming. That means some of the best animated flicks around will hit Netflix sometime next year.

A really cool Power Up electric motor for paper airplanes landed this week. The kit is made to go inside your paper airplane and gives it an electric motor to make for longer flights. The funniest story of the week was the moron that got stuck in a manhole trying to get his phone back. The dude claims he was jumped by gang members who tossed his mobile phone into the drain.

The Fujitsu Toshiba IS12T WP7 Mango smartphone got official this week. If you are looking forward to Mango you can see a bit about the device on the video with our story. We also learned this week that Mango has been released to manufacturing. That means the OS is finished and devices using Mango will be coming in droves.

HTC apparently developed a work around that will get it out of the patent issue that has been ongoing with Apple. HTC says that it will switch to the new solutions no matter the outcome of the current patent battle. NASA is set to decommission the ISS in 2020 and will dump the space station into the ocean. The station will be dumped into the ocean to avoid having it become a massive piece of space junk.

Nintendo slashed the price of the 3DS portable to $170 to try to boost sales. Those that paid full price will get a bunch of free games to make them feel better about paying so much more. The ITC ruled this week that Apple’s Mac OS X infringes on HTC S3 patents. However, it found that iOS doesn’t infringe on those patents.

An industry insider is claiming that the iPhone 5 will hit the second week of September. The iPad 3 is also tipped for a November launch. ThinkGeek has a cool water balloon filler called the Tie Knot Water Balloon Filler that makes water balloon wars more fun. The device will fill the balloons and then has a cool tie mechanism to make that easier as well.

AT&T will start throttling the speed of heavy users of mobile data in early October. October is also pegged as the launch of the iPad 3 making me wonder if this is in preparation to add a tablet that might suck bandwidth. A Chinese guy took a fake MacBook Air into a real Apple Store in China. The crazy part is that the Apple Genius actually fixed the fake Air for the owner.

Cory reviewed the Motorola PHOTON 4G smartphone this week. He figures the 4G performance is mediocre but otherwise the handset is very solid. Cory also posted up a review of the LG Thrill 4G as well. He thinks the smartphone is a great handset even if you don’t use the 3D features.

Perhaps the most impressive and depressing story of the week is that Apple has more cash in reserve than the US Government has. Apple is sitting on a cash stockpile of $76 billion. Thanks for reading this week’s edition of the SlashGear Week in Review!

The continuing Android legal assault is reportedly seeing some smartphone firms looking for other operating systems. The legal assault is said to be sending phone makers to Windows Phone and MeeGo. LinkedIn’s CEO has said that Google+ can’t coexist with Facebook and Twitter. Jeff Weiner has claimed that Google+ makes demands on time that users don’t have.

Eric Schmidt has said that Apple’s lawsuits are prompted by jealousy and a lack of innovation. He said that the Android suits are “inspired by our successes.” An early version of Google+ iOS app was released by accident this week. Thousands of users were able to download the app before it was pulled leading to issues for some that had use the app.

A company in China has faked a complete Apple Store and it looks almost just like the real thing. Apparently, the fake Apple Store was selling real Apple gear though. Vince went hands on with the IdeaPad K1 and the ThinkPad Tablet this week. Vince liked the ThinkPad Tablet, but thinks the K1 will struggle.

Apple is hinting that the iPhone 5 will come in September. CFO Peter Oppenheimer mentioned the company would undergo a “future product transition” in September. Apple refreshed the Mac mini desktop computer this week. The main changes were new Sandy Bridge processors and a dual-drive server version along with Thunderbolt.

The MacBook Air was also refreshed along with the mini this week. The refresh brought new Sandy Bridge processors and Thunderbolt. The Senate Antitrust Subcommittee chairman is opposing the AT&T and T-Mobile merger. The chairman says that the merger could cause substantial harm to competition and consumers.

The Space Shuttle Atlantis touched down last week and ended 26 years of space flight aboard the shuttle fleet. It will be four years before the US has a replacement for the Shuttle. Some really funny mock T-Mobile commercials have turned up that make fun of the merger between AT&T and T-Mobile. If you haven’t seen them, they are worth a watch.

Toyota showed off some cool concept tech this week with a window for a car that lets the user zoom in on things that are far off. The odds of this sort of tech coming to market are slim. Some official pics of the Droid Bionic surfaced this week at Amazon when the listings for some accessories turned up on the site. The accessories were a desk dock and a car dock.

Google+ has grown to 20M unique visitors already. While the growth is massive Google has admitted that its brand strategy was a mistake on the project. A special edition Star Wars Kinect bundle is coming that has the console in R2D2 livery and the controller is designed to look like C3PO. The console will land in time for the holidays at undisclosed pricing.

We put up our review of Mac OS X Lion late last week. Burns really liked the OS and said that it would be the OS he uses for the foreseeable future. Gerber unveiled a new multitool called the Steady that has a camera tripod built in. The tool will land next year for about $65 and will be great for photo shooting hikers.

Rue posted up a review of the Toshiba Thrive tablet. She figures if you are willing to go with the fatter design you better really want the full size USB port. The tablet is also cheap but those seem to be its only big selling points. Vince also posted up his review of the new 13-inch core i5 MacBook Air. The new Air has portability and performance with the only lacking point being no integrated 3G. Thanks for reading this week’s edition!

Facebook deactivated Open-Xchange to block personal data migration. The move is seen as an easy to block the easy export of contacts from Facebook to Google+. Apple targeted HTC in a second case with the ITC this week. The second case also alleges patent infringement.

AntiSec has stolen 90,000 military email addresses and passwords in their latest hack. The emails and passwords were stolen from the servers of military contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. HTC was mad at Apple for the second patent infringement suit with the ITC and called Cupertino out for competing in courts and not on products. HTC obviously “vehemently denies” Apple’s claims of infringement.

A lifelike and rather gross looking Angry Birds cake surfaced this week. The green pig heads looked like they could have been lopped off a real pig, assuming green king pigs were real. An awesome looking flash drive turned up that has a combination lock cover. The drive is a concept made by hand and has a cool steampunk look to it.

Apple was heavily into the legal dramas this week with Samsung demanding that the Appel legal team be disqualified. Samsung alleges that the Apple legal team has a conflict of interest since the law firm has a founder that worked for Samsung on a case in the past. Google suspended accounts on Google+ that used Pseudonyms because it wants people to only use their real names. The “avatar-based names” can be put in the other names field.

Some cool Concrete Building Blocks landed this week that are the same size as normal 2 x 4 LEGO bricks. The blocks are perfect for the huge LEGO fan that likes things that are a bit odd. Bluetooth support for the Apple TV was discovered in iOS 5. The functionality will usher in the ability to use Bluetooth gaming controllers and lots more.

The beta 3 version of iOS 5 has a really cool feature for FaceTime mirroring in it. The feature lets you shoot FaceTime calls over to a larger screen. Google has announced that an address book uploader will be coming soon to migrate contacts to your Google+ account. Google offered no time frame on when the uploader would be offered.

Nokia hinted that it was eyeing other markets than its own handsets for Nokia Maps. The company has started to tell people that Nokia maps works just as well on iPhone and Android browsers as Nokia phones. We already know that the Mango update for Windows Phone 7 is coming this fall. A tweet hinted that the winners of a competition that will get WinPo 7 smartphones as part of the prices will have Mango on the smartphones and the devices will be given by September.

Music fans probably wet themselves a little this week when Spotify finally went live in the US. The streaming music service is available as a free offer with an invite and has paid versions as well. Google announced that it is activating 550,000 Android devices daily and that it has hit 250,000 apps on the Android Market. The activations are growing, in May 500,000 Android phones were activating daily.

Google+ now has over 10 million users with about a billion items shared each day. That means the service has grabbed 13% of the 750 million users Facebook has in only two weeks. Researchers developed a cool new flexible memory that has the consistency of JELL-O. The new memory may usher in a new era of implantable electronics.

Apple is set to launch refreshed MacBook Air notebooks next week according to sources. The machines are expected to have new processors and Thunderbolt ports. Microsoft leaked plans for a new social networking concept called Tulalip this week. The leaked page was replaced with a statement saying it was an accident.

The Pentagon announced that Cyberspace is an operational domain for the US military. All the rampant hacking that has been taking place will now need to deal with military efforts to block and find the attackers. Files on the Android Market have hinted that Google has a music store in the works. Details are scant by the files point to music and movies. Thanks for reading this week’s edition, see you next time!

Apple was the latest firm to be hacked by the cyberthugs Anonymous and AntiSec. The hackers released a list of names and passwords that they claim came from one of the Apple servers. Apple was found to infringe on two patents held by S3 Graphics. The patents have to do with handling images.

Early in the week the twitter account of Fox News was hacked and the hackers sent out a message claiming that Obama had been shot. The hackers sent out several messages before they were stopped and left Fox News with some explaining to do. ARM is looking at providing a Mali mobile GPU in the next 18 months with serious power. The GPU claims to have the same power as the Xbox 360 and the PS3.

Facebook has blocked the friend export tool to prevent easy migration to Google+ and other services. The tool was a Chrome extension and it was banned on a rule not allowing automated data harvesting. Pegatron is readying 15 million next generation iPhones for a September launch according to sources. Curiously, the source claims the iPhone 5 doesn’t seem to have any significant update compared to its predecessor.

SlashGear went on Google+ last week and offered a bunch of invites to our readers to join us. Google+ is pretty cool and we have been having fun with it so far. Wistron has signed a patent agreement with Microsoft for the patents relating to Android devices. It is now added to the growing list of companies paying Microsoft to build Android devices.

Michael Bay was caught sampling a scene from one of his old films called The Island for Transformers 3. Most people aren’t surprised that this is happening; I would bet it cuts down on the budget for the film. The iPad 2 can now be jailbroken using the website Jailbreakme.com. Once jailbroken the site makers suggest you get the Cydia store update to block the PDF exploit.

Amazon, AT&T, and Verizon are all now in talks to buy Hulu according to sources. I hope none of the mobile carriers buy the service, I fear they might make it private to their own users. Google has announced that as of August 1 it will delete all Google Profiles that are not public. It doesn’t want private profiles on the service.

A German security firm warned that iOS has a major flaw in the way it handles PDFs. The flaw could allow malware to be installed if the user opens a PDF. HTC has admitted that its purchase of S3 Graphics was a patent grab. It will use the patents offensively and I am sure the infringement Apple was making figured into the buy.

The Verizon Droid 3 smartphone went official last week. It claims to be the world’s thinnest QWERTY smartphone and looks pretty cool. We reviewed the new Acer Aspire Ethos 8951G notebook computer. The machine is a worthy contender as a desktop replacement with little to complain about.

Insiders are claiming that there will be two iPhones released in September. The sources claim there will be an iPhone 4S and an iPhone 5 launched. An Apple patent app has surfaced that shows a method of moving files from one device to another by pouring them. The patent shows a physical gesture and sound effects for trading files.

Space shuttle Atlantis took off for the final mission for the shuttle fleet on Friday. The mission is STS-135 and after it returns, the shuttle will fly no more. Vizio’s Honeycomb Android tablet hit Amazon with a pre-order price of $350. The tablet is pre-order status and the exact ship date isn’t offered.

The most expensive phone to make for HTC is the Thunderbolt thanks to the speedy hardware inside. The teardown done by iSuppli suggest the phone costs $262 to build. Thanks for reading this week’s edition, see you next time!

A really cool steampunk smartphone surfaced early in the week that has on old school rotary dial on the back. The front of the smartphone has a touchscreen like a modern device melding the old fashioned with the new and high-tech. The Olympus E-PM1 PEN camera got its first short hands on treatment. It is one of the small interchangeable lens cameras that shoots DSLR image quality.

The Mac Pro and Mac Mini are tipped to be getting a refresh in August. The machines are expected to get new Sandy Bridge processors, Thunderbolt ports, and the Lion OS. The MacBook Air was tipped to be coming in a new black finish when it is refreshed. We found out not long after that the black color was scrapped.

RIM had a really bad week with poor quarterly earnings reports. Reports also surfaced that RIM was forcing carriers to take Blackberry devices into their stores before they were ready to be used. The most awesome Hot Wheels track in the history of tracks turned up this week. The track has 1,100 cars on it and took four years to construct.

More rumors surfaced that the iPhone 5 will be launching in August and that the smartphone will be a game changer. The rumor claims that devs were given the iPhone 4S for coding purposes and the iPhone 5 will be what hits the market. I already mentioned that RIM had a very bad week, but many workers will had a worse week to come. RIM is starting layoffs and 200 workers have already been let go.

A Japanese firm called TES NewEnergy has come up with a very cool way for people in Japan still without power to charge their smartphones and other devices. The pan generates electricity from boiling water to keep devices powered up. Apple has been granted a new patent that may turn out to be a game changer. The patent is for multitouch on smartphones and just about all devices use the tech today.

The Motorola Droid Bionic is reportedly still on schedule to hit stores. The phone first turned up at CES in January and sounds really cool. A rumor surfaced that the Eee Pad Transformer 2 will hit in October or November. The new tablet is said to use Tegra 3 and run Android Ice Cream Sandwich.

Archos unveiled its G9 Android tablets this week with dual-core processors, 250GB of storage, and the tablets are 3G ready. The Archos 101 G9 will go for $349 with the Archos 80 G9 at $279. An AMD Bulldozer engineering sample CPU turned up this week. The leaked processor also offered a few details about performance and more. Thanks for reading this week’s edition!

The HP TouchPad ended up on video again showing off what you can expect from the WebOS tablet when it lands. The entry-level 16GB version is supposed to be $499.99. The Facebook IPO is expected to happen this fall and some think that the IPO could top $100 billion. That is a lot of money for the social networks valuation and the firm already has 500 private investors.

The next version of the iPhone is said to be in the final stages of testing and set for a September launch. We are still wondering if the Verizon version will get LTE support or not. Chris put up his review of the HTC ChaCha Facebook smartphone. He figures the Facebook button has little purpose in this iteration.

The unlocked iPhone 4 landed for sale in the US this week. The device is priced from $649 making it quite expensive. Apple settled the Nokia patent battle last week and ended up paying licensing fees to Nokia. Apple will also pay ongoing royalties as well.

Sources claimed that a new MacBook Air would be landing this month. The machines are expected to get Intel Sandy Bridge processors. According to a report this week it might coast as much as $1.3 billion a year to run iTunes. That number breaks down to $113 million monthly.

Devs are claiming that the coming Nintendo Wii U is 50% more powerful than a PS3 or Xbox 360. It had better be good; Nintendo is hurting right now and needs a popular product. An artist took a bunch of old computer parts and used them to build a room. The finished product looks interesting and a bit creepy.

Game devs are claiming that the Xbox 720 will debut at E3 2012. The name of the console is said to be sort of a working title and the hardware is yet to be confirmed. The JVC Kaboom boombox landed this week looking like the 80′s. The device has an iPhone and iPod dock on the front.

Nintendo confirmed that the Wii lacks the ability to play Blu-ray or DVD movies. I think that is something that any modern console should include. HTC went back on the statement made earlier in the week that the Desire would get no Gingerbread update. After a huge backlash HTC put the Gingerbread update back on the map.

I wondered at the time HTC said Gingerbread was coming back how they would fit it in since the citied lack of storage as the reason to skip it originally. HTC came back and said it would drop apps to fit Gingerbread. YouTube gave the Nyan Cat video its own Nyan Cat custom load bar. It’s cool for sure, but Davies was unable to explain to me the point of Nyan Cat, apparently, I am too American.

Lenovo confirmed that it’s ThinkPad Honeycomb tablet would be landing in August. The K1 tablet has a Tegra dual-core and lots more. The Call of Duty: Black Ops Annihilation Map Pack will hit Xbox Live later this month. The pack will bring four new multiplayer maps and a new zombie map.

The Palm/HP Pre 3 has been pegged to launch in the UK on July 8. The tip comes from Play.com and the smartphone has decent specifications for people that like WebOS. Panasonic announced a new ToughBook Android tablet that will be coming this year. The tablet will have a 10.1-inch screen, active stylus, GPS, and optional 3G/4G connectivity.

Apple changed its complaint in the patent battle with Samsung adding more products. Apple also worded the complaint more strongly and is going after Samsung with more verve. We put up our review of the HTC Evo 3D smartphone. Cory figures the new smartphone is a worthy update from the original Evo. Thanks for reading, see you next time!

During WWDC iCloud went official and we learned all of the details on the new offering. You can learn all about the features of iCloud and they sound really cool in this story. During WWDC we also learned that OS X Lion would be offered in the Mac App store next month for only $30. I wish we could expect Microsoft to try and match that price with Windows.

The HTC Sensation is rumored to have a “Death Grip” issue like the iPhone 4 had. HTC has naturally denied any such issue with the smartphone despite some user reports to the contrary. Ben did his analysis thing with the new features that Apple is offering on iOS and OS X. The features will certainly be enough to keep Mac and iOS fans happy.

At E3 the Xbox 360 was announced to come in a new limited edition Gears of War 3 design. The bundle will include the console, a controller, and a copy of the game and the design looked really cool. After only a few hours of being available to download iOS 5 was jailbroken. The tethered jailbreak used the limera1n exploit and a tethered boot.

Apple unveiled the iMessage feature that will not be liked by carriers. The new feature allows for free SMS messaging and will mean that some users kill off their texting plans. Vince went hands on with the cool Nintendo Wii U at E3. You can check out the hands on video here.

Nintendo offered the full features and details on the Wii U at E3. If you want to learn all there is to know this side of pricing and availability in one story, this is it. Steve Jobs revealed a new campus for Apple that is planned for construction in Cupertino. The campus is described as a spaceship and looks like a big ring.

The OnLive Player for iPad and Android tablets broke cover at E3 last week. The OnLive Player will allow the tablet users to play any one of about 100 games on the tablet. HTC promised an unlocked bootloader for the Sensation smartphones. The Sensation devices were ready to ship before HTC promised to deliver the unlocked loaders on its devices.

We rounded up all the announcements for Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo at E3 and put them into one article. This is the cheat sheet to all the cool unveilings. If you want a short and to the point overview of WWDC 2011 in a few minutes we have that too. You can get the highlights from WWDC here.

HP’s TouchPad is set to hit the US on July 1 from $500. This tablet runs WebOS and is the first tablet to use the new operating system. Citi has admitted that hackers gained access to its servers. The hackers stole data on about 200,000 cardholders.

Microsoft announced that it would sell three HTC Windows Phone 7 smartphones for only a penny. The devices include the HTC Trophy, Arrive, and HD7. A man has invented an awesome Hoverbike that is classified as an ultralight. The thing reminds us of the Star Wars bikes that raced around the forest in Return of the Jedi.

Last year Apple rejected an app called WiFi Sync over security concerns and other things. The same exact feature with the same name and a very similar logo has now turned up in iOS 5. Samsung has launched the first commercial for the Galaxy Tab 10.1. It makes fun of the iPad 2′s lack of Flash support.

Chris posted up his review of the HTC Salsa late in the week. Chris thinks the Salsa is an odd phone and the Facebook button makes little sense this time around. Geeks digging into iOS 5 have found confirmation that the iPhone 5 will have 1080p video export and an 8MP camera. That 8MP camera has been rumored by several sources.

LulzSec has taken its collective hacker eyes off Sony for a bit and used them for something else. The hacker group has taken down the terrorist site Aljihad.com. Thanks for reading this week’s edition of the Week in Review, see you next time!

The Asus PadFone went official at Computex. This tablet is powered by a smartphone that slips into the tablet’s dock. The tablet portion has a 10.1-inch screen. A new HTC smartphone was spied running wild this week packing in Windows Phone Os. The phone is most notable for hits high-resolution 12MP camera sensor.

LG unveiled a new iMac-style AIO computer at Computex that has a passive 3D screen. That means no bulky and expensive active 3D glasses are needed. A rumor surfaced that claims the iPhone 4S will have an integrated SIM card and the iPhone 5 will land in the spring of 2012. There have also been claims that the iPhone 4S has been seeded to developers.

The Intel Ultrabook debuted during Computex. The machine uses second-generation Core processors and will sell for under $1000. The Sony PSN is back online as of Friday, which was good news for many gamers. The bad part is that Japan and other countries are still down.

A hack surfaced for the Galaxy S II smartphone that adds 1080p 24 Mbit/s video recording. The smartphone records 16 Mbit/s 1080p HD video by default. Apple WWDC 2011 is coming soon and one of the things that will be at the show is iCloud, OS X Lion and iOS 5. Steve Jobs will also be on hand at the show for the keynote.

HP has issued a recall on laptop batteries – again. This recall covers 162K more batteries and is spawned by the discovery that two notebook models were skipped in that previous recall. A cool concept product called the Cornobi surfaced. The Cornobi is a corncob holder that looks like the handle from a lightsaber.

A rumor is floating around that Microsoft might buy Nokia’s mobile phone division. The rumored price for the purchase is a whopping $19 billion. Nokia’s CEO has teased a prototype handset that might run Windows Phone or MeeGo. The only official word on the device from Nokia is its not running Windows Phone, which may simply mean the device lacked an OS when handled on stage.

The TI OMAP4470 1.8GHz dual-core processor is coming in the first half of 2012. This processor is based on an ARM A9 core and is designed for Android, Linux, and to run Windows on the ARM platform. The Nook Color Android eReader has been hacked to run the MeeGo OS. This little reader has turned out to be one of the more impressively hackable Android devices on the market.

A very cool case for the iPad 2 called the Crux landed late in the week. The case turns the iPad 2 into a laptop with keyboard. A crazy little Android mascot picture was found in the Samsung Galaxy S II ROM this week. The mascot is dressed up like Ironman with a Flash logo on his chest.

An awesome LEGO construct turned up and looks like the Sandcrawler the little desert dwelling robot thieves used in the old movies. The thing has remote control action and used 10,000 bricks. We put up our review of the T-Mobile Sensation 4G this week. We figure the Sensation 4G is a very nice phone and will hit all the right buttons with casual and hardcore Android users. Thanks for reading, see you next time!

The HTC EVO 3D smartphone pricing landed thanks to a RadioShack ad. The smartphone is going to cost $199.99 after a $100 trade-in savings from turning in your old phone. We put up our review of the HTC Sensation smartphone Monday and it is a very nice smartphone. We think of the Sensation as the consumers Android phone next to the Galaxy S II as the Android fans phone.

President Obama and the First Lady were touring Ireland in the armored limo called “The Beast” when it ran aground on a hump leaving the Dublin Embassy. The Pres and First Lady had to leave the car for a second vehicle. Apple won the case against Samsung in court and has been granted early access to Samsung smartphone and tablets. The ruling comes amid allegations from Apple that Samsung is stealing its designs.

The first full trailer for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has been unveiled and the game looks really cool. Previously trailers showing all of the regions where the game plays were offered, but this is the first full reveal trailer. Windows Phone Mango went official Tuesday. Microsoft announced that Acer, Fujitsu and ZTE would be making handsets using the new OS.

Police in Hampshire UK scrambled a helicopter with tranquilizer dart teams to capture a tiger reportedly prowling near a golf course. The tiger turned out to be a stuffed toy. The PlayStation store was rumored to be launching again last Tuesday. That launch didn’t happen on Tuesday.

YouTube turned six Wednesday. The website now serves 3 billion views per day and still can’t figure an ideal way to make money off all that traffic. Pioneer officially unveiled the AppRadio car stereo this week. The radio mirrors content from your iPhone to the radios larger touchscreen.

We unboxed the LG Revolution and spent a little hands on time with the phone. The device is positioned as an entertainment phone and has a big 4.3-inch screen. An artist built a pyramid at the KW institute for Contemporary art out of cases of beer. When the exhibit opened, the artist let viewers climb the pyramid and drink the beer.

Thursday we learned that some prisoners in labor camps in China were being forced to gold farm in World of Warcraft. Prison bosses are said to make more from selling the virtual currency than forcing the prisoners to dig ditches and break rocks. Google officially unveiled its Google Wallet project Thursday. The projects main partners are Citibank, MasterCard, First Data, and Sprint.

Sony has confirmed that the PlayStation 4 is in development. Sony’s CFO Masaru Kato would not give any time frame on the new console and only said it was in the works. A guy built his own ukulele out of LEGO bricks on Friday. The LEGO instrument can be played and tuned just like the real thing.

HTC has officially announced that it will be unlocking bootloaders on its smartphones. HTC found that users were not happy at all about having locked down bootloaders when most of the market is going to unlocked loaders to allow hacking. Friday we put up our review of the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play smartphone. This is the phone that is focused on gaming across the board. The problem is that the phone doesn’t standout as a phone or as a gaming system. Thanks for reading this week’s edition, see you next week!

An old VW van surfaced on a car lot that had tank treads. The bus body was riveted to the treads of an old WWII all-terrain vehicle. Sony outlined the welcome back content that people coming back to the PSN would be offered for the long outage. PSN users will get two free games and a lot more.

A flaw in Android has been discovered that opens up Google and Facebook accounts to theft. The flaw would allow details to be extracted if the user is connected to an unsecure WiFi network. Scientists and astronomers have discovered a planet about 20 light years from Earth that they believe could be habitable. The planet is called Gliese 581d and it orbits in the zone where life could exist.

Verizon started taking pre-orders on the Xperia Play smartphone on May 19 with the smartphone hitting stores on May 26. This phone should be popular with the mobile gaming crowd. A video shot during a developer meeting has surfaced that reportedly shows the Wii 2. The clip shows the devs watching a video presentation and what appears to be a prototype is on display.

An awesome looking chair turned up this week called the Inception Chair. The design uses a bunch of increasingly smaller chairs nested together to create the very cool look of the seat. A Mentos and Diet Coke rocket went horribly wrong for one guy and horribly funny for the rest of us. Two guys loaded up a bottle with the concoction, threw it on the ground a few times, and then it takes off and nails the camera guy.

Sony just can’t win, a new hack surfaced for PSN users to deal with. The new password reset scheme wasn’t well thought through apparently. The details needed for hackers to reset the passwords themselves were among the data stolen. Apple has reportedly warned AppleCare team members from fixing Mac malware problems. The fixes are to stop while Apple investigates the Mac Defender and Mac Security trojans.

Sharp and NHK showed off a cool sounding new 85-inch LCD this week that is Direct-View and works with Hi-vision. Hi-vision offers much more resolution than the 1080p screens on the market today. We learned late in the week that Kindle eBook sales have exceeded print sales in the US. Amazon has sold 105 Kindle books for each print book on the US website.

An explosion has occurred at the Foxconn iPad 2 plant in China. The exact cause is unknown, but at least two were killed and 16 were injured in the explosion. Chris unboxed the HTC Sensation and offered up some impressions of the device on video. The phone is well built and seems to work well, expect a full review soon. See you next time!

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.

Apple whipped out a new version of the iMac AIO computer this week. The machine gained Thunderbolt, Intel Sandy Bridge processors and FaceTime HD video chatting among other things. The Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 tablet got some hands on playtime this week and that hands on time landed on video. The new tablet is thinner than the iPad 2 and the smaller screen may make it better for users looking for portability.

We posted up our review of the Asus Eee Pad Transformer tablet this week. There is room for improvement, but we liked the Transformer very well. A geek has decided to permanently keep his Nintendo 3DS augmented reality card with him by having the card tattooed on his forearm. The tattoo shows his Mii when viewed using the 3DS camera.

We went hands on with the new iMac Tuesday. The unit we played with was the Core i5 version running at 3.10GHz, the full review will be coming at later date. One of the big complaints with some organizations for the blind with the iPad is that the tablet has no way for vision-impaired people to use it. A new concept for the iPad called iSense allows the tablet to use Braille.

An artist put a giant wall made from white LEGO bricks on display at the World Trade Center in Amsterdam. The wall took 270,000 LEGO bricks and about six weeks to build. Worked surfaced mid-week that the Aaron’s rent to own store was installing software on their rented laptops that allows them to take photos of the people using the notebook webcam. The issue surfaced when a coupe that paid for a notebook at the store had manager show them a picture of them using the machine.

Mass Effect is one of my favorite video game franchises. We learned this week that Mass Effect 3 had been delayed until 2012. A cool and reasonably priced robot for education turned up this week using open source software and parts called POLYRO. The bot is intended to be extended with more features and costs about $2,000 to build.

Thursday, word surfaced that Best Buy had fired an employee for trying to stop a shoplifter. Best Buy policy is to let shoplifters leave and when he worker tired to restrain the thief, he was told to let the crook go. The Sony Ericsson XPERIA mini and mini pro smartphones went official this week. The smartphones will both hit stores in August.

A very cute and cool concept robotic vacuum system turned up late in the week. The concept is the Puppy Vacuum and it has a quartet of robot puppy vacuums that suck up dirt and then dump it into the momma dog where they also get charged. Insiders are claiming that Apple might be shedding the Intel processors in their machines in the future for ARM processors. Apple is said to be looking at mid-2013 for the change.

According to one data security experts, Sony knew the software it was using on the PSN was out of date. The allegation is that had the software been updated, the breach might not have happened. Jaguar announced Friday that it would be building a limited number of the cool hybrid powered supercars called the C-X75. The car will have a top speed of about 200mph and 800bhp.

As of today the PSN is still down for most users with Sony having found more issues. Sony is still saying that it is working to ensure the of the network. Thanks for reading this week’s edition of the Week in Review!

A really cool LEGO helmet that looks like the ones the Minifig astronauts wear that is sized for kids to be able to put on turned up. The helmet is very cool and has speakers inside to read LEGO comics to the kids via a digital file right off a USB drive plugged into the back of the helmet. Apple is facing its first class action suit over the tracking of user location details on the iPhone. The suit is seeking class action status and is asking for compensation.

Sony showed off two new Android tablets running honeycomb. One of the tablets is a traditional design called the S1. The other tablet is the S2, and it uses an unconventional dual screen folding design. Kodak unveiled a new AIO printer this week. The cool part about the new Office 2170 is that it can print files from mobile devices, and it can print 3D photos too.

Chris reviewed the Samsung Galaxy S II smartphone this week. In the end, he thinks that the Galaxy S II might be the best Android smartphone on the market today. I really like the products that Quirky and its users come up with. The latest produce is a really cool Fender Bumper for the iPad 2, and it is designed to work along with the Apple Smart Cover.

Sony offered upset PSN users a bit more information Tuesday when it officially said that a hacker was the cause of the outage. Sony also said that the user information stored on the PSN had been compromised. The long running SETI program that uses the massive Allen Array that scans the skies for signs of extraterrestrial life has been shut down. The array was terminated after congress cut the funding for SETI from NASA’s budget.

Users of the Xbox 360 game console have another entertainment option now. Hulu plus landed on the Xbox 360 last week for members to view all the content they want. Sharp unveiled a gigantic video screen room it had designed for a Japanese theme park .The room has a total of 156 60-inch screens arrayed all around the room on walls and ceiling to completely immerse users in the video.

New PS3 models have hit the FCC, and they have new model numbers on them. The new numbers are CECH-3001A and 3001B, at this point we don’t know what the difference between the new consoles and the old ones already on the market are. AT&T issued another warning to users who are tethering the iPhone 4 that it will automatically charge $25 if they unofficially tether their device. AT&T had previously sent out warning messages via text to users suspected of tethering.

The massive breech of the Sony PSN could well end up costing Sony literally a fortune. The estimated cost of the breech could end up totaling $24 billion. Pepsi has unveiled a very cool new social vending machine that uses a big touchscreen. The cool machine will let user’s gift drinks to a friend or to complete strangers, talk about pay it forward.

Foxconn doesn’t take kindly to people that leak designs from its factory. Three Foxconn workers have been arrested and charged with leaking the iPad 2 design that was used to create cases and shells for the iPad 2 well ahead of the official unveil of the tablet. Another chunk of bad news came Friday for users of the PSN. Security experts warned that the credit card data for users of the PSN was apparently up for sale on the black market.

The white iPhone 4 smartphone landed in stores this week and some geeks already have the white iPhone at home. Some have discovered that the white iPhone 4 is thicker than the black one making some cases not fit. Chris posted up his review of the HTC Wildfire S on Friday. The smartphone may be a very good choice for the mainstream user on a budget.

Square has announced that it will be launching a new credit card reader this summer. The new reader will have encryption at the read head, which is something that its competitors said the reader needed from the get go. The HBO Go app has landed on the Android and iOS platforms. The app lets subscribers stream original show and movies to their smart devices.

Amazon has undercut iTunes on the price of new and popular songs on its music store. Amazon is now selling popular tracks for 69 cents each. Thanks for reading this week’s edition, see you next time!

The white iPhone 4 went live at Three in the UK early in the week. The product page shows that the white smartphones will ship on April 20. Samsung has a new processor that will be here by next year called the Exynos that will take on the NVIDIA Tegra 2. The Samsung processor will operate at a blazing fast 2GHz speed.

Some details of what Nokia has coming with Windows Phone onboard leaked early on Tuesday. The leaks show off a chassis 2 prototypes that have a much better flexibility for customization and more. Apparently, there are X7 and N8 variants and a touchscreen candy bar style phone like the E6. The Blackberry Playbook is now on sale in a WiFi only version. The Playbook comes in 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB versions starting at $499.

One of the bigger stories of the week was the suit Apple filed against Samsung over the Galaxy series of smartphones. Apple is alleging that Samsung stole the look and feel of the iPhone for the Galaxy line of devices. A video surfaced with a white iPhone that is running what is supposed to be iOS 5. According to the person on the video, the OS is set to be launched this year.

Korg unveiled a cool new app this week for the iPad called the iElectribe Gorillaz. The app is a little digital beat box that allows you to make all sorts of beats. The app sells for $9.99 for the first 10,000 purchases. Netflix may be considering revamping its service to encourage users to have more than one stream within each home. That would be an interesting way to allow you to streamed different movie or show to different TVs. The investor FAQ outlines a way that Netflix will allow a family to have multiple accounts under one umbrella account.

We reviewed the Blackberry Playbook this week and found it lacking. The tablet has rough edges and needs a Blackberry smartphone for some of the features to work. A man was arrested in Florida this week for trying to rob a store using a PlayStation remote control. The robbery was foiled when police officer walked in during the robbery.

Vince reviewed the T-Mobile G2x smartphone mid-week. The smartphone is the best Android device in the T-Mobile line up and has the powerful Tegra 2 processor. 7-Eleven stores will have a crazy new cup for the Slurpee coming this summer. The cup has two chambers so the flavors don’t mix and a two-piece straw to enjoy those flavors too.

A Verizon executive has confirmed that the iPhone 5 will be a global device and has both a GSM and CDMA radio inside. The revelation came during a conference call about the financials for last quarter at Verizon. Amazon had a massive failure of its Cloud services this week that knocked out several major websites. The sites that went down included Quora, Reddit, and Foursquare. The cause of the outage wasn’t offered at the time it occurred.

A leak Friday has lead to some details of the Wii 2 “Stream” console leaking out. The leak revealed that the new console has HD resolution and a touchscreen. Another interesting rumor that floated around late in the week had Apple seeding game developers with new iPhone 4S prototype devices. The new devices were said to have an A5 chip inside just like the iPad 2 uses.

Researchers at the University of Michigan have discovered a new property of light that allows they to harness light’s magnetic attributes. The hope is that the discovery might lead to a new type of solar panel that is more efficient. Verizon activated LTE service in six new cities on Friday. The wireless carrier also noted again that it has plans to activate 100 more cities in the next nine months. The Sony Playstation Network went down for unknown reasons. Sony is investigating and has noted that it could have been the work of outside sources.

There were several new websites that launched as few weeks back that offered to unlock your iPhone without having to use software. Apparently, they were manipulating the IMEI number inside the Apple database. All of the sites have now been shutdown with no indication of what happened; presumably, the Apple legal ninjas cut them down. Thanks for reading, see you next week!

Apple has been going about its business and hiring new employees for key positions inside the company. A couple of the new hires at Apple were former gaming company marketing types leading to the conclusion that Apple might be getting ready to take on Sony and Nintendo in the gaming realm. Some cool parody videos surfaced this week that use characters from Star Wars to spoof the Windows ads where people say they came up with Windows 7 features. There are three ads with Vader, Chewy, and a storm trooper.

Korg is famous for synthesizers and the latest it a drum synth called the Wavedrum that turns your table or desktop into a drum kit. The synth has a clamp for the desk surface and it has a pad on it as well that you can drum on. The Asus Eee Transformer was released last week in the UK. A geek needed only the one day to root the tablet and crack it open for all sorts of other possibilities.

We put up our review of the interesting Looxie Bluetooth video camera this week. We used the camera with a HTC ThunderBolt smartphone. We liked it and think you should get one, assuming you can stand looking odd with a camera on your ear. A crack for Apple AirPlay has surfaced that opens the door for unofficial streaming. You can bet that a fix will be coming as soon as possible from Apple to fix that hole.

The US Navy tested out a new laser that is mounted on a ship this week. The laser was able to target a small boat and disable it with FIRE, FIRE, yeah, yeah. The HTC Sensation leaked on video and the video showed off one of the cool new features that will be on the smartphone when it goes public. The video focused on the new Sense launcher.

Suppliers have told DigiTimes that the iPad 3 isn’t coming this year. I don’t think any of us were surprised considering the iPad 2 just landed. Researchers have used the display on the iPad 2 to offer up a cool 3D effect that need no glasses. The front camera was used to track the users face for 3D viewing.

Sony dropped its PS3 jailbreak lawsuit against GeoHot this week. I am sure George is relieved and the terms of the resolution with Sony and GeoHot haven’t been disclosed. The HTC Sensation qHD 1.2GHz smartphone launched officially this week. The device is packed with high-end features and runs Android 2.3.3.

Kitchen gadgets are cool and one of the new ones spied this week was the Steak Button. You poke this thing into your steak and it tells you what temperature your steak is at in plain language so you know that it is cooked just right. A document about the alleged Roswell UFO crash in the late 40′s turned up on the FBI Vault site. The document recounts what an FBI agent was told by an investigator from the Air Force.

A really cool and expensive personal brewery surfaced that brews your beer for you mid-week. The thing brews, ferments, and then cools and dispenses the beer. A massive super jumbo jet clipped a smaller jet on the ground this week at JFK airport. The larger plane spun the small aircraft around and thankfully, no one was hurt, though some underpants probably needed replacing.

Spotify is apparently getting set to place limits on how much free music that users of the service can hear. The limits are to get the users to upgrade to the paid service and when Spotify finally lands in the US, it will have these limits in place as part of the agreements with the record labels. Users of Windows Phone 7 will finally get Angry Birds on May 25. This is one of the most popular games around on mobile platforms.

HP’s coming webOS 3.0 was leaked and the geeks at PreCentral got hands on it. The OS is set to land officially on HP devices this summer. We caught Samsung’s demo of Smart TV Live streaming to the Galaxy Tab on video this week. The feature can shoot that video out to the Tab from the D7000 and D8000 series Smart TVs.

Duck Tape brand duct tape unveiled some cool new square tape sheets late in the week that will be perfect for DIY fans. The squares are about $10 for a pack of six or $2 each and come in different colors and patterns. The Microsoft Xbox 360 is still tops in console sales so far in 2011. The claim comes from NPD with the Xbox moving 433,000 units in March.

We did our unboxing thing with the T-Mobile G2x smartphone and offered up some hands on thoughts yesterday. The phone is pretty cool and a full review will be coming soon. The people at Instructables have a new DIY step-by-step that shows you how to make your own Angry Birds that are edible. The look pretty cool and remind me of clay more than something edible. That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading, see you next week!

A dude showed off the prank he played on his wife on April Fool’s day. He took his name on her iPhone, changed it to AP Mobile, and then sent a text saying that the Pentagon had confirmed the Roswell crash was alien. The Asus Eee Pad Transformer got its official product page Monday. The official product page turned up cementing the final information missing for consumers, though we already knew all there was to know about the Transformer.

Anonymous has hacked Playstation.com and Sony.com as part of its retaliation against the legal action with GeoHot and other hackers by Sony. I am sure this will only lead to more legal action by Sony. What may be the coolest Wii mod ever turned up Monday called the Wii UNLimited Edition. The hack out the Wii components inside a different case that is liquid cooled.

Hackers have accessed the database of one of the largest email marketing firms out there called Epsilon. The hack opened up email addresses belonging to customers of JPMorgan Chase & Co, Kroger, Capital One Financial, and TiVo to more spam. Nikon unveiled a cool new DSLR camera this week called the D5100. The camera is reasonably priced at about $900 in kit form, records HD movies, and has up to ISO 102,400 when extended plus lots more.

Ubisoft Battle Tag has crossed the FCC. This is sort of like laser tag for the kids of today. Developers of Android apps are saying that fragmentation in the Android market is a huge problem. The fragmentation is thanks to a bunch of different OS versions and different handsets with vastly different capabilities.

A prototype leaked that is supposed to be a 5th generation iPod touch with 128GB of storage inside. The image also shows that the physical home button on the device has been replaced with a capacitive one. A strange product that is likely fake surfaced called the RE-35 that looks like a can of film for 35mm. The device supposedly has a sensor that makes your 35mm camera into a digital camera to print digital prints.

Analysts are claiming that the Motorola Xoom and Atrix 4G are failures. The claim comes after the analyst did channel checks and found sell-through to be low thanks to stiff competition on the market. A cool all-touch HP webOS flavor called Stingray leaked mid-week with the Verizon Pre3 smartphone. The OS would make the keyboard free smartphone work better and might get HP back into the smartphone market if the Pre3 doesn’t suck.

We put up our review of the T-Mobile Nokia C7 Astound this week. We think it could be a contender, but has less mindshare than Apple and Android devices. GameStop has confirmed plans to offer a gaming tablet later in 2011. Right now, the company is still trying to decide on using its own design or another slate design available via OEMs.

Apple has rejected an iPhone app for lack of functionality that offered all iAds in one place. The crazy thing is that Apple later offered its own app that does the same thing. Michelin has developed new inner tubes for bicycle tires that can repair their own punctures. The tubes use a special design and air pressure to seal the puncture and have a fluid inside to seal the puncture as well.

The BlackBerry Bold Touch 9900 has been spied in the wild. It has a touchscreen and the QWERTY keyboard that BlackBerry is known for. Android is expected to own 49% of the smartphone market by the end of 2012. As Android is growing fast, Symbian will be shrinking nearly as quickly.

Geeks around in the 80′s will remember the Commodore 64 computer back then that was cool and really expensive. The Commodore name is back on a new computer that has Intel Atom power inside. Reports came in that a student is making $50,000 yearly jailbreaking iPhones. He started for friends and then put ads on Craigslist and turned it into a profitable business.

The FCC mandated new data roaming rules for AT&T and Verizon this week. The new rule forces the big carriers to open up their data networks to smaller carriers just as they do with voice networks. Apparently a geek picked up a very cheap 500GB HDD that was a Chinese knock off of a real HDD with 500GB of storage. Unsurprisingly the thing didn’t work and when it was opened it has short-term memory inside not HDD storage.

AMD has been trying to round up some new Andorid talent for its operations. The company is looking at offering chipsets and other hardware with support for the Android OS. If you are a fan of the video game Portal, you will be glad to hear that Portal 2 is almost here. The game is set to come out on April 19.

An elementary school in Main is issuing iPad 2 tablets to Kindergarten students for free. A teacher found with her own iPad 2 that the tablet helps kids having trouble learning significantly and the school board was so impressed that they voted to purchase the tablets for all kids. Thanks for reading this week’s edition, see you next time!

Sony Ericsson announced that it was going to offer up a new Android bootloader unlock tool. The catch is that the tool will only be offered for certain handsets in its 2011 lineup. We went hands on with the Nokia C7 Astound for the T-Mobile network early in the week. The phone is small and for now all you get is some light impressions with a full review coming soon.

We put up a review of the HTC Desire S, which is the follow up to one of the most popular Android phones of 2010. The phone is reliable and with well-made software that will be another HTC bestseller for sure. The Samsung WiFi only Galaxy tab got an official price and date. The tablet will landed on March 31 for the equivalent of $477 on Amazon UK. European regulations announced early in the week that some episodes of the cartoon The Simpsons would be editied for content. The shows with references to nuclear accidents and radiation are being cut.

An awesome underwater dome that reminds me a lot of Bioshock that is 100-years old turned up in images. The dome is under a lake in Witley Park in the UK and is part of an old mansion that was built by J. Whitaker Wright. Windows Phone has been tipped to get an update that will bring NFC payments to the device. This is no surprise given all the focus some big companies are putting on NFC payments over the last few months.

We spent some time putting together an first impressions video of the Asus Eee Pad Transformer for you to check out mid-week. We found a lot to like and will be offering up the full verdict on the device in a few weeks. The Eee Pad Transformer and the Eee Slate EP121 also both had their official price and launch date announced. The Transformer will sell for the equivalent of $688 on April 6 with the slate landing on April 10 for the equivalent of $1602. Tesla announced that it was suing BBC and Top Gear over a test the Top Gear crew did on the Tesla Roadster. The Top Gear crew claims the Roadster ran out of power after 55 miles and had to be pushed while Tesla claims the batteries were still charged and working.

A guy made a DIY slingshot later in the week that doesn’t shoot rocks or BB’s. This slingshot shoots machetes and is sure to cause the loss of a finger or two at some point. An awesome item perfect for coffee drinkers turned up on Thursday called Coffee Joulies. They are silver coffee beans with some polymer inside that melts to absorb heat from coffee that is too hot and then puts that heat back into the drink to keep it warm.

Chris put up his skeptics review of the iPad 2. Chris figures he can respect the iPad 2, but finds it hard to love. We reviewd the Sony Xperia Play smartphone late in the week. The phone doesn’t deliver the knockout punch that would have made Sony’s day and the device lacks the polished experience we wanted to see.

A doctor took his robotic surgical tool and used it to make tiny paper airplanes. The doc did this to show how much dexterity and control the tools have and they are impressive. A dude took a phone book and crammed it into the port of his massive car stereo where the air is displaced. The air was powerful enough to blow pages out of the phone book.

We rounded up all the wacky April Fools products that surfaced on Friday. We always see some crazy gear this time of year and on occasion, some of the crazy gear actually turns into products. Sony CEO Howard Stinger let slip that Apple is buying “it’s best sensors” from Sony. Presumably that means that the iPhone 5 will be using the 8MP sensor that Sony makes.

The stock of the iPad 2 in stores may improve with Apple adding a new display panel provider. Apple has AU Optronics making the IPS screens of the tablet now too. That’s all for this week’s edition, see you next time!

The Asus Eee Slate EP121 got an official release date. The tablet will hit the UK on April 20 and it will sell for the equivalent of $1627 here in the US, which is a lot of green. Microsoft might be eyeing 2015 for a replacement for the Xbox 360 game console. The tip on the date comes from the portfolio of a designer working with Microsoft.

T-Mobile customers will eventually need to replace their mobile phones once the merger with AT&T goes through. AT&T notes that it will be years down the road before that happens and most people will need a new handset by then anyway. The Blackberry PlayBook tablet got an official price and launch date Tuesday. The tablet will hit the US on April 19 starting at $499.

Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 8.9 and Galaxy Tab 10.1 went official at CTIA. The new offerings are billed as the world’s thinnest mobile tablets. We spent a bit of hands on time with both of the tablets at CTIA. The tablets are nice, but Samsung is mum on pricing which is one of the most critical aspects of the tablet.

Sprint held an event at CTIA where the HTC Evo 3D smartphone was unveiled for the first time. The device has a dual core processor 4G connectivity, and 3D with no glasses needed. We got our geeky mitts all over the Evo View 4G Tablet at CTIA as well. We think the Scribe Pen that the tablet can use might be the superstar feature.

In more hands-on action, we felt up the HTC Evo 3D under the bleachers at CTIA. The phone is cool but the test unit had poor viewing angles and the screen looked bad in 3D from anything but straight on. A former curator for the Science Museum in London built a model of an ancient astronomical calculator. The model found that the original was able to precisely predict the yearly motion of the sun, moon, and planets and was a calculator.

Sony claimed late in the week that GeoHot had run away to South America to get away from the legal crusade Sony is on. Sony also claims Hotz sabotaged HDDs that were handed over to third parties for investigation. 2K announced that Duke Nukem Forever has been delayed again. The game was pushed to a June launch making this the shortest delay in the games history.

NVIDIA has unveiled a new video card called the GTX 590. With the card NVIDIA laid claim to the world’s fastest and quietest crown. Google has announced that for now it has decided not to release the source code for Android 3.0 to outside devs. This is the tablet specific OS, it seems that with the Tablet focus Google fears it would land on some smartphones and provide a bad user experience.

RIM has announced that the Playbook will officially support Android apps. The announcement came Thursday as RIM promised to expand the app ecosystem for the tablet. GeoHot responded to Sony’s suggestion that he fled the country to avoid prosecution on Friday. Hotz says he is on vacation for Spring Break, not running away.

The Nook Color eReader is getting access to apps on Barnes & Noble and Flash support in April. The new features will make the Nook Color into a cheap little Android tablet. Researchers have created some really cool batteries that have very fast recharge times. The tech in a full-scale battery would be able to charge to 90% capacity in two minutes.

Friday we posted up our review of the Nintendo 3DS. We figure 3D is a bit gimmicky and while the 3DS is cool, seeing value in the expensive console and the expensive games is tricky. Thanks for reading this week’s edition, see you next time!

Analysts claim that Apple sold a million iPad 2 tablets last week. Best Buy is said to have sold out in ten minutes. The Japanese market Prius will get an option for lithium ion battery packs. A cheaper model will continue to use the nickel metal hydride batteries that all other markets have no other choice over.

AT&T announced intentions to put data limits on its U-verse and DSL plans for home users. The limits are 150GB for DSL and 250GB for U-verse. Time Warner Cable launched a new iPad app that is the first ever to play live TV. The app launched last week for subscribers only and it will only work in the home.

We went hands-on with the iPad 2 and unboxed it on Monday. Burns tried to set a world record for waiting the longest to open his and couldn’t last. An awesome DIY pinball machine using dual LCDs and some other tech surfaced. The emulator software lets you play all sorts of old school pinball machines.

Apple is taking peoples old iPads and donating them to Teach for America. You get no money for your donated tablet, but you may be able to take it as a tax deduction. A cool bottle opener concept turned up mid-week that has a handle that is a bottle and holds the caps after you pop them off your frosty beverage. Who knows if it will ever hit the market.

Some hints at the price of the Sony NGP turned up this week thanks to an Ubisoft sponsored survey. The 3G version was pegged at $350 and the WiFi only at $250. The iPad 2 was gifted with its inevitable Will it Blend treatment this week. Naturally, it would blend.

An EA boss has hinted that we might see a new Wii 2 at E3 this year. E3 isn’t that far away and this is the first hint we have heard of the console so I think this is dubious. On the other hand Nintendo is hurting on the profit side and a new console would help them greatly, so who knows. The military has some apps for Android and iOS devices in the works that will allow soldiers on the ground to control the camera on a drone in the air. The apps would allow the solider to see where enemies are and to find weapons caches more easily and safely.

Pepsi showed off a new green bottle that will go into testing soon. The bottle is made from plant material that would have otherwise been thrown away. Western Digital offered up a new and massive capacity My Book Studio Edition II External HDD. This drive has a massive 6TB of storage inside.

Apple tweaked it stock system in retail stores according to some reports. The tweak allowed workers to tell people that the iPad 2 was out of stock even if it wasn’t so they would have tablets to sell the next day. We have now heard that the iPhone 5 will have NFC tech and that it won’t have NFC tech. I think that we won’t know until Steve pulls the thing out of his pocket in June.

Scientists studying Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, have found evidence of heavy precipitation on the moon. Rather than water, it’s raining liquid methane on Titan. A geek found Friday that the magnets in the iPad 2 SmartCover were strong enough to stick the tablet to his fridge. I would worry constantly that it would crash to the floor. A new Samsung LCD for computers with a 27-inch screen turned up this week. The screen uses UWB tech needing no wire between the computer and the screen for video.

Optometrists have approved the Nintendo 3DS for use by kids under six. Nintendo had previously stated they should not play the console for long periods because it could damage their young eyes. It surfaced this week that way back in 2000 the Google founders wanted Steve Jobs to run the show as CEO. Jobs was at the time just back to Apple and hard at work in the iPod so Google went with Schmidt instead.

Friday we posted up our review of the HTC Thunderbolt. We found that the smartphones performance was sub-par thanks to its weaker dual-core processor. Did you see the gigantic moon last night? We mentioned yesterday that it was the moons closest position to the Earth, which is why it looked so gigantic. Thanks for reading this week’s edition, see you next time!

Samsung says that its Galaxy Tab 10.1 is on schedule and no changes will be made to the device. This is after reports surfaced last week that Samsung was rethinking the Tab 10.1 and changes might be made. Western Digital announced that it plans to purchase Hitachi GST in a deal that will cost WD $4.3 billion. The deal still has to get regulatory approval before it can complete.

National Geographic has taken the cartoon house from Up and reproduced it in the real world. They attached a bunch of large balloons to the outside of a house shell and then floated it with the balloons. A judge decided to allow Sony to unveil the IP addresses of all the folks that visited the GeoHot website. The intention is to try to figure out if any of those people downloaded the PS3 hack GeoHot made.

Reports surfaced that Facebook and Skype are in talks to create a video calling system to fight Apple FaceTime. I could see them adding this capability to your Facebook page. Microsoft reportedly paid Nokia $1 billion to use Windows Phone on its handsets. The price was reportedly to keep Nokia from going Android.

The Lenovo ThinkPad X220 and X220T got official last week. The T version is a convertible tablet and the rigs promise up to 24 hours of runtime with the optional battery. Tesla offered up some new details on the Model S EV. The car will hit mid-2012 and will have a 300-mile range.

An interesting S.N.A.K.social networking keyboard landed this week. The keyboard has all sorts of shortcut keys for Facebook to allow access to functions with one button press. A cool watch concept called the Konect turned up. The watch had a USB section and looked like something from Star Trek.

Philips debuted an interesting TV called the Cinema 21:9 Gold that is 3D capable and allows two people to play games on side-by-side screens. This is a seriously wide TV. Samsung has outted new platter tech that allows 1TB of storage per platter. That means that 4TB HDDs will be possible soon.

Kaspar the creepy robot surfaced early in the week. The bot is designed to help autistic kids and interact socially with others. Why do helpful robots have to be so creepy? Logitech unveiled a new set of speakers for computer users called the Z906 that are THX certified. The speakers have 500W of power and will sell for right at $350.

NVIDIA showed off the GeForce GTX 590 video card with Dual GPUs. The video card is expected to ship on March 22. A geek created an awesome laser gun that will melt foam and pop balloons. It may be the best geek DIY ever.

Microsoft brags that about 10 million Kinect sensors and games have now been sold. I wonder how many of them are still in use or are actually being used for games and not some sort of geekery. A new rumor has pegged the white iPhone 4 to be coming in April. The rumor also claims that the white iPhone may be for AT&T only.

The Kinect was hacked to perform home automation duties. The sensor was used to turn the lights in a room on or off when you entered or left.

Gemini unveiled the FirstMix DJ controller this week. The controller is USB and is designed to be a cheap entry for new DJs to the market at about $80. A cool earphone design surfaced that uses a zipper to combine the cords of your earbuds to keep them from getting tangled. It’s a simple solution to an issue that really bugs many folks.

Canon announced this week that it would be supporting the Thunderbolt standard from Apple. That should allow photographers to shoot video and photos over to a Mac much faster than using USB. Apple sold a lot of iPad 2 tablets this week. After moving 600,000 of the tablets the ship date slipped to 5-7 days.

Flash Player 10.2 is due to land in days. The update will bring Flash support to the Motorola Xoom tablet. Some leaked renderings of what is supposed to be the iPhone 5 surfaced Friday. The renderings show a larger screen than current offerings.

Geeks at iFixit took a new iPad 2 and ripped it apart. They always show us what the innards of gadgets look like right when they launch. A student in NYC was first in line at the Apple Store to get an iPad 2. Another geek offered $900 for that first spot and the student sold it. Thanks for reading and we will see you next week!

An ad agency in New Zealand created a new board for park benches that presses an ad into the legs of the people that sit down. When those ad pressed folks start to walk around people behind them can read the ads. Fujitsu unveiled a really cool 22-inch screen that has no cords at all. The display uses inductive power and wireless data links for a very clean look.

TazTag announced that it would be showing off a new tablet at CeBIT 2011 called the TazPad. The little tablet is pretty slick with NFC, ZigBee and the Android OS onboard. Intel outted a new SSD early in the week called the 510 Series that uses the SATA 6Gbps port. The cool part about that is that the SSD has blazing fast 500Mb/s read speeds.

Tractor beams are a sci-fi staple when it comes to capturing enemy ships trying to escape. Chinese physicists think that they tech might actually be possible by using laser beams to turn photons in to tractor beams. LG has won an injunction against Sony and customs in Europe has seized PS3 shipments. LG has also filed for an injunction against Sony in the US but so far that hasn’t been granted.

The price on the WiFi only Xoom tablet by Motorola was confirmed Tuesday. The tablet will sell in the UK for £449.99 ($734). The cool and geeky InPulse smartwatch has been updated with Facebook Places check-in capability. The feature allows the user to check in with one button press.

A company called Tobii unveiled an interesting laptop this week that is controlled using the eyes. All the user needs to do is look at an icon to launch it. Microsoft is launching the next version of IE on March 24. The new browser would be IE 9 and 36 million copies of the beta are in use.

We reviewed the new 15-inch MacBook Pro notebook computer early last week. The new notebook is dramatically faster than the one it replaced thanks to Sandy Bridge. Some shots of what was supposed to be the iPad 2 leaked early in the week ahead of the official unveil by Apple. The images showed the back of the tablet.

Olympus Tough TG-810 “crushproof” digital camera surfaced this week and it has GPS and should be strong enough for some harsh climates outdoors. The camera has a 14MP sensor and 5x optical zoom among other things. Olympus also unveiled another new standard digital camera called the SZ-30MR. The camera has a 16MP sensor and can shoot 1080p HD video and still shots at the same time.

At the iPad 2 event, mid-week Steve Jobs took a chance to bash the Android Market and the number of apps for Android 3.0. A nice little graphic noted that there were 100 Android 3.0 apps and 65,000 iOS apps. The Apple iPad 2 went official on Wednesday and we were at the event to see it firsthand. The new iPad 2 has a dual-core processor, front and rear cameras, and lots more making it a worthy update to the original.

We spent some hands on time with the new iPad and put it on film for you to look at. The video shows off the features of the iPad 2. Mid-week we also spent some time comparing the iPad 2 to the original iPad. This is the story to read if you are trying to decide if you should upgrade from your original iPad.

We learned that some of the new Samsung Galaxy S II smartphones will have NVIDIA Tegra 2 inside and some will have the Samsung Exynos SoC inside. The catch is buyers will have no idea what version they are getting. Sprint has teased that it may have a new LTE network in place across the US as early as late-2013. The final decision on to LTE or not will be made later this year.

The new dock for the much thinner iPad 2 surfaced this week with a new design. The new dock will cost $29 and has a 3.5mm headphone port for connecting external speakers. RIM is apparently getting version of its BlackBerry Messenger app ready for both Android and iOS devices. This is expected sometime in late 2011 according to source and will let the different devices chat on the BlackBerry platform.

The Apple Digital AV Adapter surfaced this week that will work on the new iPad 2 as well as the iPhone 4, latest touch, and the iPad. The adapter will shoot video in HD resolution out to the TV via HDMI. A wind-powered mobile phone charger concept surfaced at Yanko Design late in the week. It looks like the wind turbines that are used offshore to generate power and in this case, it sends power to a charge pad that needs no wires to charge your device.

If you purchased an iPad in the last two weeks and were mad when you saw the new iPad 2 launch and the price of remaining iPads get cut you can get a refund. Apple is offering people that bought in the two weeks before the new iPad landed a $100 refund. A Samsung exec has noted that the company is looking at the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and will improve parts of it that are inadequate. The changes could include a new lower price.

The first 3D film in the Star Wars franchise has a release date. Episode I The Phantom Menace will land on 2-10-2012 in theaters around the country in 3D. Microsoft started to let owners of Samsung WinPo 7 devices get the download that was previously pulled after some smartphones were bricked. As it turns out the “fixed” updatehad issues as well.

Angry Birds now has its own official page on Facebook. A version of Angry Birds will be coming to Facebook soon. Asus has tipped that its will have a 3D quad-core tablet this year and might have a Windows Phone in 2012. The devices will use a quad-core chip and that chip is thought to the NVIDIA Kal-El. Thanks for reading, see you next time!

Microsoft opened the Kinect SDK up to folks that like the hack the motion sensing camera to do more than Microsoft intended. The personal use SDK is set for launch in March and a commercial version is coming later. Samsung has added a cool new feature to the Galaxy Tab 10.1 with the ability to steam TV. The feature also lands on the Galaxy S II.

We learned early in the week for some leaks that new MacBooks were sitting on pallets in retail stores around the country. Apple had strict orders to not unpack the pallets until the unveil later in the week. A cool capacitive brush for the iPad has surfaced that is sort of like a stylus that allows the user to draw. The brush is from Nomad and each brush sells for $24.

I think most of us were expecting the Verizon iPhone to do much better than it has. The number of people that have downloaded a popular app called Instapaper has remained basically the same with the launch of the new iPhone. This suggests that most buyers for the Verizon iPhone are from AT&T. The Sony Vaio S series broke cover early in the week. The notebook packs a 13.3-inch screen and a battery good for 14 hours of runtime. The notebook uses up to the Intel i7-2620M, 8GB of RAM and up to 128GB SSD for storage.

The Apple iPad 2 is said to be releasing in June after a production delay according to an analyst. The delay is reportedly the result of last minute changes to the new iPad 2 expected to be unveiled next month. Spring Design is phasing out the Alex eReader that has been on sale for almost a year. The device will reportedly be retired over the next six months with no replacement expected at this time.

A dude has taken the menacing looking Megatron tank from Transformers 2 and created a DIY replica of the thing. This isn’t some small toy tank either, the tank weighs five tons. Windows 7 SP1 is now available. The new update for the Windows 7 OS is available for download and is 1.9GB.

Dell will start shipping the XPS 17 and XPS 15 laptops with Sandy Bridge inside on March 16. The machines will start at $1049 for the 17 and $899 for the 15. A cool iPhone accessory surfaced this week for bicyclists. The device is called the iBike and uses a waterproof case and sensors to turn the iPhone into a bike computer.

HP has unveiled new EliteBook and ProBook business notebooks. The notebook boasts up to 32 hours of battery life and can be had with Core i7, i5, and i3 processors and screens of 14-inch and 15.6-inch. The Motorola Atrix 4G got its obligatory teardown this week by iFixit. The innards of the cool smartphone are apparently easy to upgrade and repair.

Husqvarna unveiled a neat robot lawn mower mid-week called the Automower 305. The mower is battery powered and designed for small lawns. Razer unveiled the new Chimaera in standard stereo and 5.1 versions this week. The headphones are wireless and will work with the Xbox 360 and PCs.

An Apple event has been confirmed for March 2 that will see the new iPad 2 get unveiled for the first time. The event is taking place at 10am in San Francisco. An interesting alarm clock has turned up that has some IQ questions on it. The iQ Alarm alarm goes off until you answer the question on the screen correctly and if it’s a dumb morning for you things could get annoying.

A sweet little personal submarine turned up mid-week called the Ego. The thing has a boat on top that floats on the water and the cabin is underneath allowing the passengers a view of the undersea action. We posted up our review of the Motorola Xoom. Even lacking Flash and 4G we found a lot to like with the new tablet.

We went hands on with the Vodafone Galaxy Tab 10.1. The tablet was pretty nice and we liked it with final judgment reserved for a full review. Apple officially unveiled the new 2011 version of the MacBook Pro notebooks. The most notable new changes are AMD graphics and a new IO port called Thunderbolt.

Sprint has halted the over-the-air update to Froyo for the Samsung Epic 4G. The update was stopped after complaints that the update was breaking the phones. We spent a bit of hands-on time with the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Thunderbolt. It’s cool, expensive, and final judgment will come with the review of the machine later.

Fujitsu announced late in the week that its Stylistic Q550 slate PC with Windows would be launching this sprint. The tablet will start at about $800. The MacBook Pro that launched during the week has already been torndown by iFixit. The machine has new RAM inside. The notebook is certainly well packed inside the metal chassis.

An interesting universal sleeve for gadgets turned up called the NXE ActiveSLEEVE. The thing is designed to fit on the arm while people workout and keep their smartphone and other gadgets safe. Skype To Go launched late in the week and allows the user to make calls at lower rates without having to have a web connection or a 3G area. The service works on landlines and any mobile phones.

The world’s first robot marathon will be held in Osaka, Japan. The event will see the humanoid walking bots traveling 26 miles over four days on an indoor track. Verizon CEO Dan Mead has stated that LTE products are coming from Apple. Mead didn’t offer any product names or a timeframe.

Google changed its search algorithm this week to combat content farms. The fear is that some legitimate sites might be caught in the change. Thanks for reading this week’s edition! See you next time. 

Pandora is looking to do more than music in preparation for its IPO. Pandora is said to be looking at expansion into talk and sports programming. The LG Optimus 3D smartphone got official Monday. The phone packs in a 1GHz dual-core processor, 5MP dual lens camera for 3D video and a 4.3-inch screen.

RIM announced a pair of new PlayBook 4G tablet models early in the week. The new PlayBook 4G models added versions for LTE and HSPA+ both with WiFi and they are set to land in H2 2011. One of the biggest announcements at MWC 2011 was the Nokia and Microsoft tie up for WinPo 7 on Nokia smartphones. Nokia claimed at the show that the decision was made the night before the show and that Intel knew before the show started.

Another smartphone to debut during MWC was the Acer Iconia Smart running Android. The notable feature is the big 21:9 aspect ratio screen that measures 4.8-inches. The HTC Desire S smartphone got official this week. The device gets a 1GHz processor, a 3.7-inch screen, and will run Android 2.4.

Intel unveiled a new high-end processor Tuesday called the Core i7-990X Extreme Edition. The CPU has six cores, runs at 3.46GHz, and can be overclocked to 3.73GHz using Turbo Boost. One of the big HTC announcements at MWC was the interesting Flyer tablet. We posted up a video of the device being shown by a HTC schlep since the company wouldn’t allow us to hold the tablet.

HTC showed off a pair of new Facebook smartphones called the HTC ChaCha and Salsa. The ChaCha has a QWERTY keyboard and a 2.6-inch screen, the Salsa is a touchscreen only device with a 3.4-inch screen, and both have a dedicated Facebook button. That HTC Flyer tablet I mentioned earlier has the ability to play streaming games from OnLive. The tie up came after HTC invested $40 million into OnLive.

Rumors surfaced that Apple plans to give the next iPhone model a larger 4-inch screen. Whether or not that will happen remains to be seen. A soldier in Afghanistan has taken to a very cool hobby. He is building action figures out of the stuff he comes across at the base where he is stationed and they look really cool.

NVIDIA unveiled details on the Project Kal-El quad core chip early in the week at MWC. The chip would be the first quad-core chip for tablets and phones that is sampling. HTC made so many announcements at MWC that it was hard to keep up with. If you want to be sure you know all HTC has to offer we put up a recap of all the HTC announcements at MWC.

Nokia apparently won’t have Windows Phone OS on its smartphones until at least October. Nokia is waiting for a new version of the OS. Warner Brothers is going to sell movies on the App Store as apps. The two flicks to start with are The Dark Knight and Inception.

LG announced its Cinema 3D LW5700 3D HDTV that has the first certification for being flicker free. That flicker free design means that the TV will be easier on the eyes and some people that have problems with 3D images might find that they can watch without issue. The pricing on the Motorola Xoom tablet was confirmed mid-week at $799. Motorola thinks the speed of 4G makes the price justifiable.

The iPhone 4 won an award at MWC 2011 for Best Mobile Device. The irony is that the iPhone 4 wasn’t even at the show. Pioneer unveiled a new DJM-900nexus DJ mixer for club DJs. The mixer has all sorts of effects and features and will sell for about $2400 in March when it lands.

The Motorola Xoom is heading to Europe with hints at the official launch date coming by way of an interest page from Carphone Warehouse. The page hints that April is the expected launch date. Spotify has signed a deal with EMI giving the service two of the four major music labels. Warner Music and Universal are the two remaining major holdouts.

AeroViroment unveiled the prototype of a small UAV that looks like a hummingbird. The UAV has flapping wings, battery, and a video camera inside the small package and is the result of a DARPA project. The price for the LG Optimus 3D has surfaced and the phone is very expensive. The price on the pre-order page at Expansys is listed at about $835.

Google has announced that it will invest millions into celebrity YouTube channels. Apparently, YouTube is offering celebs $5 million each to start a channel to cover payroll for production and more. YouTube wants at least 20 celeb channels. Photos from President Obama’s Tech dinner have surface and it looks like the Zuck got to sit at Obama’s right hand.

The NYT has debunked the rumors that a smaller iPhone is coming, but some interesting concepts and more rumors keep surfacing. Perhaps a smaller screen device with a keyboard would work. Thanks for reading, see you next time!

We also went hands on with the Nokia E7 smartphone Monday. We will give the full run down on the device in the review, but so far, Chris was disappointed. The eLocity 10-inch Android tablet is set to hit pre-order on February 15. The tablet is much like the 7-inch offering with a larger screen and a 4GB version will sell for $399 with the most expensive 64GB version at $699.99.

The price for the Motorola Xoom tablet surfaced early in the week and it’s very far from cheap. The tablet will sell for about $800 and may well put the first Honeycomb tablet out of contention in the tablet market. The coolest commercial during the Super bowl last weekend was the VW one with the little Darth Vader. The kid behind the mask was unveiled early in the week as a 6-year old heart patient.

The first successful Jailbreak for the Verizon iPhone 4 was announced Monday. The jailbreak was done with Cydia on iOS 4.2.6 on the Verizon smartphone. HTC unveiled that it has purchased a $40 million stake in the streaming game service OnLive. HTC wants to stream games to smartphones, which sounds good to me.

Intel has resumed shipments of flawed 6 series chipset mainboards this week. The shipments are said to be at the request of vendors and the stipulation is that the machines be configured so that the affected SATA ports aren’t used. We went hands-on with the cool dual-screen Kyocera Echo Tuesday at the official unveil. We though the phone felt well built even if aside from the dual screens it is a bit plain and some gestures aren’t supported.

The new Nokia CEO Stephen Elop has told workers bluntly that it is “standing on a burning platform” with MeeGo. Elop’s statements make it clear he doesn’t believe in MeeGo. Smartphones outsold PCs for the first time according to IDC for Q4 2010. Smartphone sales jumped 87.2% to 53.9 million shipped.

An awesome Sony DSLR camera surfaced this week with a clear housing. The camera will never see production; it’s just to show off the inner beauty of the DSLR. I would buy a clear camera like that though. AT&T announced a new change to its mobile plans that allows free unlimited calling to any mobile number in America. The plan is available for any user with a qualifying voice plan and unlimited messaging.

HP went official with the TouchPad tablet sporting webOS 3.0 mid-week. The tablet has a 9.7-inch screen, 1.2GHz processor, and more. Is it enough to battle the iPad though? We unboxed the Motorola Atrix 4G smartphone and spent some hands-on time with it. Initial impressions are that the phone is fast and we expect it to be a standout phone for the year.

Android finally beat Apple in smartphone share in the US according to IDC. In Q4 2010 Android had 28.7% of the US market and iOS had 25%. A twitter user tweeted the infamous PS3 hacking code to Sony’s Kevin Butler and he had no clue what it was. Butler replied, “Lemme guess…you sank my Battleship?”

We spent a bit more time with the HP touchpad and caught our fondling on video. Are any of you really excited about this tablet? Another swell of Apple iPad 3 rumors surfaced Thursday with calls that the new tablet would hit this Fall. The rumors started from idle musings from Daring Fireball’s John Gruber.

The Verizon iPhone 4 is in stores now and so far the response isn’t what was expected. I figured there would be shortages, but it seems not that many folks were waiting to get the iPhone 4 on Verizon. Nokia is reportedly eyeing the purchase of boutique developers for its halo apps. Nokia is also said to be in talks with Adobe to co-create dev tools.

A 7-year-old boy tried to buy a real Harrier from an eBay auction. His dad found out about the $113,000 buy and cancelled the order, crushing childhood dreams. Don posted up a column Thursday that said Google TV is dying and Apple TV running apps will finish it. I think Google TV was done for when Hulu and other networks blocked the device from accessing their shows.

Nokia has announced that it will be using the Windows Phone 7 OS on some of its smartphones. Exactly when the Nokia devices with the WinPo 7 OS will show up is unknown. Rumors have surfaced that Apple is getting a smaller iPhone ready for the market. The device is said to be about a third smaller than the current iPhone and lack a home button with a target price of $200 sans contact.

Courts have ordered GeoHot to turn over the HDD of his computer to Sony. Sony is searching for evidence of the hacking of the PS3 on the HDD. I think most of us were hoping that Nokia would turn to Android and instead it went Windows Phone 7. Stephen Elop said that there were “too many players” in the Android market for Nokia.

Nokia is shedding works in hoards right now as it tries to shore things up for the long haul. Google is reaching out to the fired engineers and offering some of them jobs. Google’s Aidan Biggins tweeted, “Any Nokia software engineers need a job?” Thanks for reading this week’s edition, see you next time!

LG offered up some details on the Optimus 3D ahead of its official MWC 2011 debut. The smartphone has a 4.3-inch screen and a dual-core CPU. We learned the Nintendo 3DS browser and eShop have been delayed until May. The browser and game store were originally expected to ship loaded on the new portable console.

Samsung has done some backtracking on the sales numbers for the Galaxy Tab after bragging about the sales numbers for a while that have climbed past 2 million. Samsung has finally admitted that those numbers are shipments to retailers and that sales to customers have been “quite small.” If you are a user of Windows Phone 7 the culprit for the phantom data use has been fingered. The cause of the issue is apparently Yahoo Mail along with an inefficiency in the WinPo 7 mail client for phantom data use some users are reporting.

LG has confirmed some more of the specs of the Optimus 3D smartphone ahead for MWC 2011 on Tuesday. We learned that the smartphone has a 3D camera and HDMI out along with a screen that needs no glasses for 3D effects. Panasonic stuck a price on its new digital cameras with the Lumix GF2 getting a $499.95 price for the body only and kits with lenses at $599.95 or $699.95.

Google accused Bing of copying its search results this week and had some proof of the theft. Google planted a fake word in its SERPs and the same word could be found with the same results on Bing apparently. Nielsen released some metrics this week that show 43% of all smartphone sales are Android devices. Android also holds 27% of the market according to the metrics firm.

The LG G-Slate was detailed this week with 3D recording and Playback being noted as part of the feature set of the device. The tablet will have a Tegra 2 processor, run Android 3.0, and have 32GB of storage along with 5MP camera. A bug in MeeGo has offered up hints at a new flagship smartphone coming soon with a 1.6GHz processor inside, 854 x 480 display, and a lot more. Other leaked specs include 1GB of RAM, 200MHz GPU, and lots more.

Mr. Potato Head is getting the Star Trek treatment this summer. You will be able to create your own Potato Head Capitan Kirk and Kor the evil Klingon to fight with and each of them will be about $30. An awesome new medical breakthrough for burn patients was spied this week called the Skin Gun. The device sprays liquid skin onto burns and wounds rather than having to perform grafts.

We reviewed the Verizon iPhone 4 mid-week and liked it. The Verizon iPhone does away with the weakest part of the AT&T offering – AT&T. A gross commercial for the XPERIA Play gaming smartphone leaked that has our little green Android buddy getting thumbs grafted on. He wants to get his game on too!

A strange contraption called the StreetFlyer turned up Thursday that hangs the rider under a big boom in a sling like a hang glider. The idea is that the rider gets the feeling of flight while riding in the bike. Apple filed a patent app for a cool stylus that will work for the iPad. The stylus will have integrated pressure detecting circuits and would communicate with the iPad via WiFi or Bluetooth.

Google has offered up a prize of $20,000 for anyone that can hack Chrome. The contest is called Pwn2Own and the winner has to successfully compromise a Windows 7 machine using Chrome. A cool set of 3D glasses from Armani called the Armani Exchange 3D turned up Thursday. The glasses are passive and will work with RealD and look very 80′s retro to me.

NASA has made a really awesome discovery. Kepler has found a group of six planets that are Earth-size orbiting one star in the area where they could have liquid water on the surface. A new iOS 4.2.1 jailbreak has been released. The new jailbreak is called GreenPois0n and can be used untethered.

Sony’s Kaz Hirai talked about the NGP portable on video this week and gave some details on why Nintendo unveiled so early in the year for a later launch. According to Hirai, the move was so Nintendo could talk with devs openly about the new console. Verizon set a first day sales record when it started taking pre-orders from existing customers on the iPhone 4. The amazing part is that the record was set in only two hours.

A thief was busted this week after he leapt out the window of a home he was trying to rob when the owner came home. The crook left his own cell phone charging in the house he was robbing. A high school freshman with an immune system problem is using a Vgo robot to attend classes like a normal student. The school district paid for the robot which coast about $6000 including the service contract.

Nokia Beta Labs released a sweet new app for some Nokia devices called Bubbles. Bubbles lets the user unlock the phone and go right to what they want to do in one motion. AT&T confirmed on Friday that the iPhone 4 will be one of the devices that gets tethering option. The tethering data allowance was also increased to 4GB. Thanks for reading this week’s edition, see you next time!

NVIDIA will be sampling its new Tegra 3 T30/AP30 mobile quad core processors by the end of 2011. These things will bring a whole new breed of portable devices and more with loads of power. One of the coolest DIY projects I saw last week was the pedal-powered snowplow that a guy built. He used a couple old bikes and some wood to build the plow that appears to work pretty well.

The 10 billionth app was downloaded last weekend and Apple called the person who made the download to give the $10k gift card price that was offered. The catch was that the winner hung up on them. Luckily for her an Apple rep called again and she ended up with her gift. Samsung conducted a strange experiment early in the week where they launched a bunch of paper airplanes in space. They launched 200 paper planes from 36,500 meters above Berlin and each plane had a card with a text message that the folks who found it could enter online for others to read.

The Verizon iPhone 4 will cost the off-contract user $50 more on Verizon that it does on AT&T. The upside is that that extra $50 should let you talk without your call dropping if you hold your face wrong. The Acer Aspire One E100 Android netbook turned up this week and the thing dual boots Android and Windows. The netbook has a 10.1-inchscreen and is your basic netbook.

Notion Ink issued an update for the Adam tablet that was bricking some of the tablets that installed the update. The update was later pulled and only a few users were affected. It was confirmed this week that Verizon will offer a $30 unlimited data plan for the iPhone 4. The catch is that it’s a limited time offer and will go back to the normal tiered plan after a while.

NVIDIA unveiled a new video card this week called the GeForce GTX 560 Ti. The card promises to be 46% faster than the Radeon HD 6950 that is already on the market and the new GTX 560 Ti sells for about $250. Ben Heck took a flashlight with a crank, a USB charger, and some geek mojo to create a cool kinetic charger. The charger puts power into the battery of your phone as you turn the crank.

The tiny Compulab Trim Slice nettop turned up this week with Tegra 2 inside for desktop PC use. This thing would make a really good HTPC; it looks more like a memory card reader than a computer to me. Details on several new Samsung smartphones turned up this week including the Samsung Galaxy Ace, Fit, Gio, and Mini. The Ace is the coolest of them all with a 3.5-inch screen, 800MHz processor and more.

The HTC Facebook phone that we keep hearing about has been tipped to land at MWC next month. The phone will reportedly use the Facebook color scheme, branding, and push the Facebook news feed. An awesome 12-foot long DIY LED matrix display turned up mid-week. The thing is really cool and uses 512 blue LEDs to show your text message.

A Verizon BlackBerry outage rolled on mid-week and to start with the blame was placed on an update by Verizon. Apparently the outage spanned a number of states and users that were affected only received email in batches an hour or so apart. The Sony Xperia Play was the subject of a pre-release preview video this week. This is the PlayStation phone and the thing looks really cool.

Thursday the Sony PlayStation Suite and PS Store for Android devices landed. The store is for Android 2.3 and up devices and has a lot of cool games for mobile gamers to download and enjoy. The Sony NGP “Next Generation Portable” went official this week. The device is the PSP2 we have been hearing about for a while and has an ARM Cortex A9 processor, 5-inch OLED screen, and a lot more. This should be one seriously cool portable game console.

A “secret” AT&T unlimited data plan is available to keep iPhone users from migrating to Verizon. One user is claiming that when he called AT&T and threatened to go to Verizon they moved him to an unlimited data plan. Hulu is reportedly in talks within the video streaming site to change from a free offering that it is right now to a virtual cable operator where we would all have to pay to use the streaming service.

Scosche shipped its new version of the flipSYNC called the flipSYNC II this week. It is available for USB charging devices and Apple gear for about $20 and the new version has a larger USB plug. The dorkiest iPad accessory ever turned up late in the week called the Assero Defender. It’s like one of those reverse backpacks parents use to carry babies, but the Defender is for your iPad.

Details for pre-orders of the Verizon iPhone 4 were offered Thursday. Verizon is going for AT&T’s throat and is offering some big discounts if you trade in an AT&T iPhone. A 16GB iPhone 4 from AT&T will get you $280 off your Verizon iPhone. Thursday we heard that the Sony NGP console would come in both 3G and WiFi only versions. That is good news since many people have no desire for 3G if they will only use it in the house.

The FCC posted up the teardown pics of the Notion Ink Adam Friday. The Adam the FCC had used what appear to be handmade connections leading some to wonder about build quality. We know the specs on the Sony NPG, but we still don’t know the price. Some speculation has been that the console might cost around $600. Sony has said the NGP won’t be $599, but still hasn’t offered pricing yet.

Microsoft is reportedly working towards 16-core Atom processors. The 16-core Atom would apparently be an alternative to traditional CPUs inside servers. Thanks for reading this week’s edition, see you next time!

The PlayStation phone landed on another video preview this week. If you are really looking forward to the device the new video may be worth a watch. You may be familiar with aerogel, which is hailed as the world’s lightest solid material. Scientists used carbon nanotubes to make that material even lighter this week.

A crazy Taxi concept for NYC that is split with a tunnel down the middle was shown for a contest to find future taxi designs for the city. The taxi has split seats and the tunnel in the middle is to allow bicyclists to go through without changing lanes. The HTC 7 Pro finally went on sale in Germany last week. The smartphone hit O2 and carried a retail price working out to $39 with a new 2-year agreement or $796 without a contract.

Consumer Reports has no love for the iPhone 4, they have already pulled their recommendation for the AT&T iPhone before. The publication is now “cautious” on the new Verizon iPhone 4. We reviewed the Lenovo U260 IdeaPad Notebook early in the week. We really liked the machine and it starts at a very nice price, lacks tons of crap ware, and performs well.

An interesting app surfaced for the iPhone this week that is called iCar Black Box. The app is a recording program that comes on automatically when an accident is detected to record what happened. A cool new Swiss Army Knife with a secure SSD inside was spied. The new device is from Victorinox and has a 256GB SSD inside. A really cool concept Mercedes turned up this week that looks like the car Tron might drive if he had lots of money. It’s called the Blackbird Mercedes and it’s really cool.

A special BMW edition of the Lexia X1 camera turned up this week. The camera has nothing new to offer but a different finish and BMW stamped on it along with an extra $1000 tacked onto the price. The Sony PSP2 is set to land on January 27 and the PlayStaiton Phone will hit at MWC 2011 according to tips from insiders that were offered mid-week. The renders of the PSP2 I have seen look a lot like the PlayStation Phone.

Starbucks rolled its mobile payments solution out to all stores in the nation this week. You can now get the official Starbucks app and pay for your coffee using your Blackberry or iPhone. Verizon is offering some of its subscribers $200 back if they upgrade to the iPhone 4. The user had to buy a new phone in the month leading up to the iPhone 4 announcement and then has to pay full price and get $200 back on a Visa gift card.

The Nintendo 3DS has been talked to death and now we know that the console will hit the US on March 27 for $249.99. That seems really expensive to me for a portable game system. The Nintendo 3DS has hit pre-order on Amazon as well. The pre-order price is the $249.99 that I just mentioned.

A really cool Andorid Flip Phone with three flexible OLED screens turned up in concept from mid-week. The phone has a triangle design and was designed by Kristian Ulrich Larsen. Facebook for feature phones launched this week with free data use on some carriers. None of the free data carriers are in the US though.

The wholesale price of the Nintendo 3DS turned up in the UK this week. The portable console has a 1/3 markup meaning it has some profit built-in for sure. Google co-founder Larry Page is going to replace Eric Schmidt as the CEO of Google starting on April 4. Schmidt will be taking the Executive Chairman position within the company.

A hack for the Apple TV XBMC turned the cheap STB from Apple in to a 1080p media center. The hack uses the official Apple VideoToolBox API allowing 1080p for non-Apple streams. The Notion Ink Adam tablet finally started shipping last week and it turned up on an official unboxing. The box converts into a desk stand to prop the new tablet up.

Some evidence turned up in the latest iOS SDK that points to the rear camera on the iPad 2 having only 1MP resolution. That really makes no sense considering the much higher resolution cameras out there. The Razer Onza Xbox 360 controllers hit pre-order this week. The $49.99 Tournament edition sold out for pre-orders already but the normal version for $39.99 was available late last week.

The Holocube grew to have a much larger screen than the original. The new version was spied Friday with a 70-inch screen large enough to project a full size holographic human. Duke Nukem Forever has taken…forever… to get an actual launch date. The official trailer for the game was released Friday and it looks really cool.

The Ferrari FF was unveiled with four-seat design and a weird style that looks a lot like the four-seat Porsche Panamera. The car is ugly to me, but the four-seat Porsche has sold very well in the US making the Ferrari offering likely to be popular with the rich needing four seats. The App Store officially hit 10 billion apps downloaded. The lucky soul that made the magic download has $10K coming in a gift card from Apple.

Alienware outted the cool looking and powerful M18x notebook computer. It can be packed with dual NVIDIA or AMD GPUs and will have a price to match the impressive specs. The Notion Ink Adam hit a bit of a snag this week after the FCC was backed up and had a delay in issuing the labels the devices needs to ship. The backlog was expected to be cleared the same week.

Kevin Rose of Digg fame announced this week that the iPad 2 was coming soon according to sources that spilled the beans to him. Rose was told that the new tablet would launch in the “next few weeks.” That PlayStation phone that we keep hearing about showed up on video this week running PS1 ROMs. The phone looks really cool and I hope the thing doesn’t suck when it finally lands.

On Monday Verizon Tweeted from the Twitter for iPhone app as CES. We all knew the iPhone was coming at this point so few were surprised I think. AMD kicked its CEO, Dirk Meyer, out of office last week and the chip giant is looking for a new CEO. As of now, there is no word on a replacement.

Intel agreed to pay NVIDIA $1.5 billion in licensing fees this week. The deal marks a 6-year cross-licensing agreement between the two firms and allows both firms to drop the legal proceedings between the two. Pioneer showed off a new prototype cycling computer powered by Android. The little thing is cool and proves Android really is heading everywhere.

We wondered this week if the iPhone that hit Verizon would hurt Android device sales. Consider that AT&T has 15 iPhone users for every Android device user it’s a valid question. I think Verizon will still sell lots of Android devices. Once the Verizon iPhone surfaced on Tuesday, we learned that the buttons are slightly different from the AT&T iPhone thanks to the CDMA nature of Verizon’s device. That means that some cases for AT&T iPhones won’t fit the Verizon offering, but some will.

We went hands on with the Verizon iPhone Tuesday and it’s the AT&T device with button and antenna tweaks. The biggest improvement is that the Verizon network isn’t a crappy in most areas as the AT&T network. A really cool case for the iPad surfaced this week called the US+U Swivel Pro with a rotating handle. Each of the cases also gets a 3% donation to one of the charities the company supports.

All iPhones no matter the carrier will get personal hotspot feature in the iOS 4.3 update. That is assuming AT&T doesn’t block it as they always have blocked tethering. A cool guitar tuner was unveiled this week called the Capo tuner from OnBoard Research. The turner has a big screen and makes tuning your guitar easy.

We spend some hands on time with the Eee Slate EP121 tablet. The tablet is a 12.1-inch machine that has more notebook DNA than iPad inside. Sprint has announced a big event for February 7 and is promising another industry first. The event will have the Sprint CEO on hand an illusionist David Blaine.

Verizon axed its New Every Two program right before the iPhone launched. The move was undoubtedly to help keep some iPhone users from upgrading so quickly since subsidies are going to eat up billions for the company. A cool wireless video card surfaced from KFA2. The card sends the video from your computer out wirelessly to your screen using a receiver and five antennas on the back. The video card is an NVIDIA GTX 460.

HorodronHD-01 concept Watch surfaced and it’s really cool. The thing has an E-ink screen and is easy to read unlike other designer watches with high-tech designs. A geek took a Kinect, Wii controllers, and a PC version of Black Ops and hacked the works to operate together. The Wii controllers handled movement, aim and firing while the Kinect recognized gestures for other commands.

Analysts are reporting that since the iPhone launched Apple may have sold as many as 90 million iPhones. Considering the device was only on one carrier in many places for a lot of that time the number is very impressive. BAE Systems is working on an e-ink system of camo for tanks. The system uses sensors to project the landscape around the tank onto the surface of the tank to hide it Predator style.

A new line of Angry Birds plush toys surfaced at Firebox. Some of the stuffed toys make noises and they will all ship in March. Liquid Image has a new set of goggles for the off-road rider that wants to record their antics. It can record in 1080p 30 fps or 720p 60 fps and stores to microSD cards.

Korg outted a new nanoSERIES2 USB controller this week. The thing comes in black or white colors and gets power and connectivity from the USB port. Apple has announced that the App Store is nearing the 10 billion download mark. The person who downloads the 10 billionth app will get a $10,000 gift card.

Some leaked iPad 2 cases have surfaced that show what the new tablet might look like. The things have the case shows the same square design as the current iPad with a larger speaker and more. A few rumors have been floating around on the specs of the iPad 2. The rumors point to a higher resolution screen, SD card slot, and more . I just don’t see Apple offering a SD card slot on anything, but I would love to be wrong on that. Thanks for reading this week’s edition!

WallWizard showed off its new line of motorized wall mounts that have a cool iPhone app for control. The app allows you to control the mount from across the room using your iPhone. Angry Birds hit the PSP and PS3 consoles this week as a mini game. The game offers 63 levels and will land on other game consoles later in the year.

An interesting MID called the OCOSMOS OSC1 landed at CES. The tablet has an Intel Oak Trail processor inside along with a 5-inch touchscreen, a slide out keyboard and it runs Windows 7. I bet there are some of you out there that didn’t wake up on time last weekend thanks to the iPhone alarm bug. That bug was supposed to fix itself on January 3 and didn’t. We still don’t know exactly what caused the alarm issue to start with.

AMD made its cool Fusion APUs official this week. These little gems pack in support for DirectX 11, 1080p HD, and 10 hours of battery life. Angry Birds for Windows Phone 7 won’t launch for months apparently. The game is on most other mobile platforms, is very popular, and has even made its way to some game consoles this week.

The Garmin StreetPilot app for the iPhone landed this week. The app is on the App Store right now for $39.99. The Tesla Model S and BMW vehicles are getting NVIDIA Tegra inside their vehicle infotainment systems. The Tegra chip will run the gauges and the large 12.1-inch touchscreen in the Tesla Model S.

50 Cent is the latest rapper to get in on the branded headphone market, but his set is much cooler than others I have seen. Fity calls his headphones the Sleek by 50 Cent and they have carbon fiber in the design. Asus went official with the EeePad Slider at CES. The tablet runs Android and has a cool slide out keyboard and a 10.1-inch screen.

We laid eyes on the cool Toshiba 3D TV at CES that needs no glasses. This is the sort of TV all people looking to go 3D have been waiting for. Toshiba says the set isn’t ready for the market yet, and we agree, but the tech has some promise. Qualcomm purchased Athros this week for a massive $3.1 billion. the purchase will get Qualcomm into computing, networking, and consumer products in a big way and branch Qualcomm into some new categories.

We spent a bit of hands on time with the Notion Ink Adam at CES. We think the Adam is a very impressive Android tablet and its Eden UI is one of the coolest parts about the tablet. We also ran some benchmarks on the Adam at CES and some Flash testing. We loaded Quadrant Advanced on the Adam, it scored 1,836, and we point out that Froyo isn’t optimized for multithreading so real world performance will be different.

Samsung has unveiled a new Sliding PC 7 Series that looks interesting. The machine is a combination of a notebook and a mobile PC skirting the land between tablet and netbook. It runs Windows 7 and weighs in at 2.2 pounds with up to 64GB of storage, a 10.1-inch screen, and an Atom Z670 CPU at 1.66GHz. What appear to be parts for the Verizon iPhone have been spotted online. The parts could also be for the next iteration of the iPhone, but the Verizon version is more likely if these pics aren’t fake.

Motorola has unveiled the Atrix 4G smartphone at CES hailed as the most powerful smartphone in the world. The thing is very impressive sounding on paper and is the first smartphone to ship with real RAM inside. Apple retail workers learned this week that there were no vacation days coming the last three weeks of January. This usually happens when new gear is coming and the Verizon iPhone is what is expected.

The Apple Mac App Store launched this week with about 1000 apps to start with. The store ended up moving a huge number of apps in the first few days it was available proving the store is very popular. Verizon went official with the HTC ThunderBolt smartphone. The device is the first LTE smartphone in the country and has nice specs like Android 2.2.1, 8GB of storage, and a microSD card slot with a single core 1GHz CPU.

JVC unveiled a cool new 3D camcorder at CES that records 3D in full 1080p resolution. It is the first camcorder for consumers to do 1080p 3D and it will cost you with a retail price a touch under $2000. A Chinese auction site has 50,000 stolen iTunes accounts up for auction with 12 hours of access offered to the accounts for about 15 cents here in the US. The site refuses to pull the auction until it gets an official request from Apple.

We ran into Mike Lazaridis at an event at CES and he whipped out the BlackBerry PlayBook and showed the thing off. We liked the bright and clear screen along with the capacitive controls in the bezel; the thing is pretty darn cool. Steve Jobs took only a buck in salary from Apple in 2010 according to documents filed by Cupertino. The board at Apple also asked for a clear succession policy for Steve is he was unable to continue at CEO of Apple.

Reports are coming in that the iPhone on Verizon may launch on February 3. That makes me wonder if the phone is coming on February 3, why the blocked vacation days for the three weeks in January? The Wall Street Journal has reported that the Verizon iPhone is going to launch on January 11. That fits in with the days workers can’t take off at Apple stores and makes that February 3 date more questionable.

After all the gear was unveiled at CES, the item voted best in show was the Motorola Xoom tablet. I admit the thing looks really cool with its Tegra 2 processor, HDMI output, 10-inch screen, and LTE data access. I want one. Thanks for reading this week’s edition, see you next time!

A lady took a set of nesting dolls and painted them to look like Dr. Who and they are epic. The dolls have the outer one painted like the Tardis and the other dolls are made up to look like all the people who played Dr. Who. BAE created a concept for war fighting robots that look a lot like the Batman tumbler. The vehicle is dubbed The Raider and is one of seven concepts that are being developed.

I have kids that like to color a lot and they like to break crayons for no apparent reason. The Crayola Crayon Maker will take those broken Crayons and melt them into a new color for your kids to use and give them a reason to break Crayons too. Comcast is considering offering low-cost broadband if the merger with NBC goes through. The access would be offered to homes that fall into a certain demographic, presumably for the poor, if they decide to.

An ex RIM worker posted a tidbit on a website this week that was since removed. The person stated in the comment that when the original iPhone was unveiled RIM didn’t think the device was going to meet the claims Apple made and would have a horrible battery life and then RIM went into chaos when they realized the iPhone did what it promised. Asus is set to slash prices for netbooks and MSI may be leaving the netbook market completely according to DigiTimes. Sources claim that tablets are hurting the netbook market so badly that some changes are coming for some of the major brands in the market.

Asus’ EEE Pads have been teased in some photos ahead of the official release at CES 2011. One of the tablets has a convertible form factor making it more a netbook in my eyes than a tablet. The Sony PlayStation phone is rumored to be launching in the spring of 2011. The device is said to be based on the PSP Go that failed so badly for Sony.

Quirky has a new accessory for geeks in cold climates that wear gloves and use a touchscreen device. The new accessory is called Digits and are like hatpins that are pinned though a glove and allows the touchscreen on the iPhone and other gear to be operated. A successor to the Samsung Galaxy S smartphone is expected to debut at MWC 2011. All we know about the device right now is that it will have a dual-core processor.

A new app called PhoneGuard surfaced this week that blocks the user from being able to text when the phone is going faster than 10mph. The device is aimed at keeping kids and workers safe when driving, but will keep passengers from texting too. Scientists were able to capture the first x-ray image ever of lightning and it looks freakin’ awesome. The bolt was apparently traveling at about a sixth of the speed of light and the camera was still able to capture the image.

Gresso has unveiled a cool new iPad that is probably more than most of us can afford. The thing has a wood back made for 200-year-old wood and a gold Apple logo. France announced that it wants to enact a tablet tax on the iPad and Android tablets, but leave Windows tablets exempt. The tax would apparently add the equivalent of $16 to the cost of the iPad.

Skype blamed the wide-ranging outage of its service on a Windows app bug that killed one of the supernodes it uses. The bug was apparently in IM server and 50% of the people on the service were running that version of the software. Netflix is looking at a wider ranging international push in 2011. Apparently the company is already talking with ad agencies about ad placements for new markets.

The Archos 70 internet tablet with Android debuted this week. It is the first Android tablet to get a 250GB HDD and it uses a 1GHz processor all for $349.99. Apparently, a man on an airline flight punched a 15-year-old boy in the arm for not turning off his iPhone when the flight crew said to. The man was arrested for misdemeanor battery once the plane landed and the kid reportedly had a mark on his arm from the punch.

Sharp announced that its Galapagos Android tablets would be coming to the US in early 2011. The tablets will also be coming to China and India as well. ABI Research has predicted that in 2011 there will be 7 trillion SMS messages sent. That is a lot of messages and included text, MMS, email, and IMs. A video turned up that shows the crazy expensive and cool Leica M9 digital camera getting built on video.

A hacker group called fail0verflow has unvield a new hack that completely bypasses the software security on the PS3. The hack will allow the user to run any software on the console be it pirated games, Linux, or home brew apps no matter the firmware version by generating its own keys. Kindle users gained the ability to loan out eBooks this week. The loan period is only 14 days and the books can only be loaned once if the publisher allows loaning at all.

A cool new accessory for the iPhone that is perfect for anyone with heart issues is debuting at CES 2011. The device is an iPhone 4 case that turns the smartphone into an ECG machine and is called iPhoneECG. The FBI raided ISPs in California and Texas this week looking for details on the DDoS attacked launched by the Anonymous group. Anonymous ran the attacks against big websites like Mastercard.com and PayPal as retaliation for the sites not sending funds to WikiLeaks.

NASA discovered more cracks in the tanks on the Discovery this week. The cracks are being repaired and for now the flight remains on schedule for launch in February. Thanks for reading this week’s edition, see you next week!

A doctoral candidate student has written a dissertation over the effects that MMORPG games have on college students. The study found that some students lose sleep and don’t eat to play their games and a large portion admits that games interfere with studies and work. A really sweet electric racing motorcycle surfaced this week called the Mission R. The bike is capable of 160mph and has a 141hp electric motor.

We reviewed the Nokia X3-02 Touch and Type mobile phone this week. We figure the thing isn’t perfect but it will satisfy most mainstream users. We reviewed the Google Cr-48 Chrome OS notebook computer early in the week. This is a strange rig where the hardware will never be sold and the software is what the story is about and we figure there is a lot to do before the OS launches next year.

Pioneer unveiled a set of white DJ gear this week. The hardware is a pearl white version of the CDJ-350 and DJM-350 that debuted in black back early in 2010. They FCC voted to enact some net neutrality rules this week and the vote was commented on by Woz, Verizon, and others. Naturally, the carriers hated the rules and others loved the new regulations.

A pic of a dude holding what appears to be a mini iPad surfaced this week. The guy holding the supposed mini iPad is some sort of racecar driver. I call shenanigans. Elliptic Labs showed off a cool touchless iPad dock that uses gestures to control the dock. The gesture interface of the dock will be shown off at CES next month.

We were sent some pics of what is supposedly some shots of a new HTC smartphone. The pics are suspected to be the HTC Incredible HD and would be a 4G device. GM announced early in the week that it is recycling the oil booms used to clean up the oil spill in the gulf in the production of plastic parts for the Volt. The plastic is being used to make the radiator covers for the car.

Chinese researchers devised a way to store data inside bacteria this week. The catch was that the bacteria could mutate and lose data and getting the data out was expensive and tedious. A crazy app for the iPhone launched called NoseDial. The app lets you dial the smartphone using your nose for folks in areas where they have to wear gloves.

The Nokia N900 got its own port of Android 2.3 this week. The port came from a dude going by DrunkDebugger and isn’t quite 100% functional but offers core features like WiFi, Audio, and others. A great tragedy happened when the infamous and uber geeky Tron Guy was barred from watching Tron: Legacy in his Tron suit. Apparently, the theater thought it would be distracting.

Skype went down leaving hoards of users without the ability to make calls and video chat mid-week. The outage started at about 3:30 on Wednesday and affected users in the US, Asia, and Europe. Skype was still having issues on Thursday, but was back online with 30% of its normal user base having access to the service. The downtime was blamed on a supernode issue.

Logitech stopped the production of its Revue Google TV box this week. The device will apparently go back into production when a new version of Google TV software lands. The Nokia N900 got the ability to control the sweet Parrot AR.Drone flying machine that was an iPhone only controlled device until now. I still think the AR.Drone is the coolest accessory for a smartphone ever.

A patent app from Canon surfaced this week that shows a really cool way the company is looking to take advantage of NFC equipped smartphones. Canon wants to use the NFC device as a display screen for your DSLR when shooting pics. High-end and crazy expensive home theater and audio gear maker Bang & Olufsen unveiled a new home theater remote this week called the Beo6. Apparently, it adds some new controls along with WiFi.

I always thought those tubes that they use at banks for sending things through the drive through were cool. A concept tube travel system for people and equipment called ET3 has been unveiled that would allow you to travel from New York to Beijing in two hours at 4000mph and it reminds me a lot of those bank drive though systems. This sounds really out there to me. Thanks for reading this week’s edition!

More rumors swirled about a half-size iPad that suggest Apple may be working on a smaller version of the iPad. That would be no surprise even if Jobs did already say 7-inch tablets are DOA. A geek took some sticky notes and a string of Christmas lights and hacked them into a way to show which of his pals were online. The lights the geek used are the GE Color Effects GE-35 LED sting and the LED data bus was hacked to create the IM status device.

Coloud has been making headphones that are sports and super hero branded for a while now and those were cool. The company has now rolled out an epic R2-D2 themed set that is really cool and sell for a tick under $50. The rumor that will not die made another round this week with the Verizon iPhone said to be coming right after Christmas. The device is also said to be an LTE handset.

A phone design concept popped up by researcher Fabian Hemmert that has tactile feedback. The phone could hold your hand, blow on you, and kiss you. This will single handedly bring new meaning to phone sex me thinks. One analyst is saying that a new HP webOS tablet is set to hit the market in March 2011. BMO Capital Markets analyst Keith Bachman cites sources in Asia for the tip.

A group of Japanese guys got together and created cool skydiving simulation using Google Earth, a projector, and some fans. The result looks pretty fun and more realistic than you might expect. German doctors made a claim this week that the world has been waiting to hear for decades. The doctors claim to have cured a patient of AIDS using stem cells and other techniques.

GNU Founder Richard Stallman stated this week that the Google Chrome OS is careless computing. He points out that when your data is stored on a company machine rather than your own machine you lose some of your legal rights. An awesome DIY Tron Skatecycle was spied early in the week and the thing has glowing wheels that look like the new lightcycles. The device started out as a device skate cycle called the Freerider.

A cool map of the world that highlights Facebook relationships shows just how connected we are globally. The map shows 10 million pairs of friends out of the 500 million people on the social network. Analysts said this week that they think a Verizon iPhone will gain users mostly at AT&T’s expense. That would mean that the number of new users to the iPhone with Verizon offering one would be less than some might expect.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was named the Time Person of the Year for 2010. The magazine says that the site founded by Zuckerberg has changed the way people relate to each other. Tablet sales in the business world are predicted to double according to a ChangeWave survey of businesses. Most of the businesses want to use the iPad and 7% of the businesses surveyed say they already give employees iPads.

A cool new way to raise money for charity has been unveiled by Google. Money for each opened tab on the Chrome browser will be given to charity with a new “Chrome for Cause” program. A wild looking stringless guitar from Misa Kitara has surfaced. The guitar uses a touch screen for strings and can be pre-ordered now for $849 on a normal plastic version of $2899 for an aluminum version.

A crazy self-sterilizing door handle won a Concept Design Award. The thing is really cool and kills off germs on its own. Door handles transmit more germs and illness than I care to think about. Geeks and Lego never fail to impress and this cool T-800 bust made from Lego is no exception. The statue even has glowing red eyes and base has tiny Lego skeletons inside.

For most of us, the largest utility bill is electricity. A concept home has debuted that is square and covered in solar panels to generate electricity. The panels power the hot water, lights, AC and all else in the concept and might even have power to sell back to the electric company. I have never seen a house key that was cool until the Keybrid turned up. The key has a ring integrated into the design and can be used as a money clip or clipped to other things. You can pick up a pair of the things for about $17.

Word Lens for the iPhone is an app that can translate signs in a foreign language so you can read them. The app is cool and it only works for printed text (naturally). PDP is showing off its cool Tron: Legacy controller that is licensed by Microsoft for the Xbox 360. The controller has glowing orange lines and sells for about $50.

EA has some of its coolest iPhone and iPad games on sale right now for the holidays at 99 cents. There are a bunch of different games available from Tetris to Madden NFL and more. A live video demo of the Notion Ink Adam tablet surfaced from the company for us all to drool over. The tablet looks pretty cool to me, check out the video for yourself here. Thanks for reading this week’s edition and have a Merry Christmas!

We spotted the world’s largest floating Christmas tree early in the week that is on display in Rio de Janeiro. The giant tree has 105km of lights on it and stands 85 meters tall. Early in the week Radio shack announced with discounts and trade-in you could get a new iPhone 4 for $25. If this is the first time you are hearing about the deal, you are too late to take advantage.

Analysts announced that they believe Verizon might pay Apple to block other carriers from getting the iPhone. That will really suck if it’s true, a bunch of iPhone fans have been waiting for the thing to hit all carriers in the US as it has in the UK. Google officially announced the Nexus S smartphone this week. The thing has some nice specs like a 4-inch screen 1GHz processor, 16GB of storage and a lot more.

Thanko offered up a crazy office chair that might get you fired called the AnyChair. The chair looks normal enough, but folds flat to make a bed for taking some naps on company time. A crazy custom iPhone 4 surfaced this week hat has diamonds and a T-Rex tooth on it. The price of the special iPhone 4 was $62,700.

Macy’s is moving 85 of its locations around the country to green LED lighting. The move is expected to save the company millions over the coming years. Insiders are hinting that the iPad 2 will ship in April of 2011. According to the rumor, Foxconn is making the new iPad and 400,000 to 600,000 units are said to be in the initial shipment.

Scientists have announced that the famous sonic screwdriver used by Dr. Who may in fact be possible to make. Engineers think that it is possible to move small objects using ultrasonic waves. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 launched this week with a MSRP of $349. The video card has 480 CUDA cores, 732MHz graphics clock, and a 1464MHz memory clock.

Google announced the chrome OS officially this week and along with it revealed the chrome notebook program as well. The first of the notebooks is the CR-48 and Google has partnered with Verizon, Samsung, Acer, and Intel to bring notebooks to market. We spent some hands-on time with the Google Nexus S smartphone this week. We think from our time with the device that it has a lot of cool to it, but right now the smartphone is a bit hard to judge.

I always wondered what they do with all those old movie posters at the theater. One geek is taking them and making some really cool iPad sleeves out of them. The Notion Ink Adam Android tablet hit pre-order on December 9. If you have been waiting for the cool Android tablet to land you might want to order yours up right now.

Monster has created a special edition Daft Punk Tron Legacy headphone set. The headphones are white with glowing blue LEDs and look really cool even if they are expensive at about $350. Insiders are pegging the launch of the PlayStation Phone to start in March of 2011. The device is still pegged to be seen officially for the first time at MWC.

Google’s Andy Rubin bragged via Twitter that there are over 300,000 Android phones activated each day. That is a lot of Android phones in consumer hands. Apple has finally fixed the MacBook Air screen glitch. The fix is part of the MacBook Air EFI Firmware update v2.0 that can be downloaded right now.

Apple is reportedly testing Sandy Bridge parts from Intel tipping a big CPU and GPU refresh for Mac fans. If you have your eye on a new Mac, you might want to wait a few months lest you be stuck with hardware that will soon be replaced by better stuff. Intel is expecting 35 Android tablets to land in 2011. At the same time Dell’s Android tablet plans were offered up making 2011 a good year for Android tablet fans.

A dude named Andrew Chase has built a really cool mechanical steampunk horse that gallops. The thing looks like the Trojan horse to me. When the Notion Ink Adam tablet hit pre-order this week the price was lower than expected. The entry-level tablet with WiFi landed at $375.33 rather than the expected $399 with the 3G version going for $425.33.

A software engineer from Apple built an awesome creation from Lego this week. The guy reproduced a working model of the Greek Antikythera Mechanism with 1500 different Lego pieces. What may be the world’s coolest coffee table surfaced called the Rock Paper Robot Float. The tablet can be purchased for a cool $2000 and uses magnets to make the individual blocks float.

A cool 3D printer called the Thing-O-Matic surfaced that can create 3D objects by carving the from a block of MakerBot ABS plastic. You can get your own for $1225. That’s all for this week’s edition, have a great week and Happy Holidays!