SlashGear Week in Review - Week 1 2011

Welcome to the first Week in Review of 2011! I hope your hangover is gone and you had a good time this weekend! Last week was an eventful one leading up to CES 2011 kicking off this month and lots of cool stuff turned up. A British DJ created a cool set of records that when overlapped form the CMYK logo. I want them and I don't even know what kind of music the artist makes.

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!