SlashGear Week In Review - Week 17 2011
Happy Easter everyone and welcome to this week's edition of the SlashGear Week in Review. With all the legal troubles between Sony and GeoHot behind him George had some loot left over in the legal fund that geeks donated to him to help fight Sony. With that money no longer needed Hotz took the $10,000 and donated it to the EFF and took the chance to laugh at Sony one more 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!