SlashGear Week in Review - Week 31 2011

Welcome to another week in review! There were some very strange and interesting stories going around over the last week and today I will run down some of the coolest of them. Samsung Q2 smartphone sales are tipped to possibly beat the iPhone. The thing that helped Samsung the most was the popularity of the smartphones like the Galaxy S II.

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!