We’ve been busy here at SlashGear getting reviews of some exciting new products for you, as well as covering all of the crazy Palm Pre, iPhone, Apple and BlackBerry rumors for you. If you missed anything last week, here’s your chance to catch up on the important stuff.
CTIA was last week, and the SlashGear team brought you lots of great coverage from the event. While new devices were scarce, we got a closer look at some impressive phones and products from some of our favorite companies. We’ll bring you up to speed on CTIA and other important news just in case you missed it.
We took a look at the MSI X-Slim X340 and compared it to the iPhone 3G and Lenovo ThinkPad X301 in terms of size. The MSI X-Slim X340 is an attractive laptop, and the planned sub $1000 price tag makes it even more so.
This week on SlashGear, we had some great articles, taking a look at some exciting new products, and one of us got to experience Beverly Hills pampering during his trip to visit DreamWorks and HP. I had the chance to review Apple’s newest button-less wonder, the iPod Shuffle 3rd Generation. It’s a great sounding mp3 player with some quirks that may take some time to get used to.
Headlines this week were a tussle between Apple’s iPhone OS 3.0 announcement and the launch of the Dell Adamo luxury ultraportable. We were pleased to see SlashGear readers in their thousands join us for our Apple liveblog and, while there may have been no new hardware, the features hitting the iPhone over the Summer – MMS, A2DP Bluetooth, copy & paste, and Spotlight, to name but a few – could keep the smartphone well ahead of the competition. That’s not what Palm wanted to hear; we ran through the key differences between the iPhone OS 3.0 and Palm Pre at our sibling-site My Pre.
Apple stole headlines this week with a surprise update just seven days after refreshing their Mac line. The new 4GB iPod shuffle is even smaller than the original, using an in-line remote and VoiceOver spoken tracknames to get around the absence of a display. Apple also released iTunes 8.1, while rumors of a multitouch 10-inch netbook flourished as first Chinese then US press picked up on the capacitive panel trail.
As busy weeks go, this one has certainly been something to write home about (or at least a Week in Review about), with CeBIT, PMA and an Apple mega-announcement all taking place. ASUS arguably stole the former show in Germany, with the Eee PC 1008HA “Shell” once again proving that netbooks needn’t be the ugly cousins to expensive ultraportable notebooks. For our full CeBIT 2009 coverage, hit the tag.
After cellphones had their way with the headlines the previous week, the past seven days have been an opportunity for netbooks to race back into the spotlight. Rumors spread about ASUS’ upcoming Eee PC “Shell” luxury follow-up to the S101, while we saw a slimline version of the Acer Aspire One. If you want a machine in the more immediate future, though, the Samsung NC20 was made official, and Dell finally launched their Inspiron Mini 10.
Unsurprisingly we’ve been Mobile World Congress obsessed this week, with myself and Vincent jetting off to vaguely-sunny Barcelona to see what’s new in the world of mobile devices. Whether a sign of a tighter consumer purse or a slowing in development, there were fewer big-hit devices than perhaps we expected, but Palm still made a strong showing with their Pre, while HTC caused ripples with both the Touch Diamond2 and Touch Pro2 as well as the Android-based Magic.
Toshiba helped us kick off the week with the announcement of their new TG01 Windows Mobile smartphone: on paper it sounds perfect, with a high-res touchscreen, super-skinny body and all the wireless connectivity you could feasibly ask for, as well as being the first device to deliver NVIDIA’s 1GHz Snapdragon chipset. Check out our hands-on photos and video demos, as well as Toshiba’s own GUI demo, and then try and explain to me why I still can’t get as excited about the TG01 as I think I ought to be.
We opened the week with our first-impressions of the T-Mobile BlackBerry Curve 8900, a surprisingly adept smartphone that’s managed to impress despite the absence of 3G. We’ve also been playing with Vuzix’s iWear AV230XL OLED video headset, and the VIA Artigo A2000 Barebone Storage Server. Finally, if you prefer your gadgets with a bit of (artificial) flesh on their bones, take a look at our Orbita Mouse unboxing; we’ll have the full review this coming week.
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