SlashGear Week In Review - Week 15 2011
Welcome to another edition of the SlashGear Week in Review! Early Monday I ran across a cool printer hack that turns your ink jet into a printer that prints with invisible ink. The ink is lemon juice and the person that needs to read the invisible ink sprays it with an iodine solution to make the letters viewable. The commercial for the Touchwood SH-08C from DoCoMo has turned up on YouTube. The commercial uses a big handmade wooden ramp with xylophone keys that play classical music when a ball rolls down the ramp.
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!