SlashGear Week In Review - Week 4 2012
This week started with a total restructuring of the heads at RIM while they consider licensing BlackBerry 10 and Chris Davies assures us that RIM's new CEO is a Placeholder, not a prophet. Of course other than that there's just a brand new Year of the Dragon in China and a radiation storm hitting the Earth courtesy of the Sun. Auroras and full video documentation from NASA intact. And HP's webOS is now open source including its good pal Enyo – and John Rubinstein is gone!
Groups such as Filesonic are cutting out file-sharing publicly to stopper up Megaupload-related mishaps. Conspiracists have an idea on why Megaupload has been targeted. Megaupload's CEO's home has been raided. Meanwhile the supreme court has ruled warrantless GPS tracking illegal. Pirate sharing websites have upgraded to 3D. A judge has ruled that the Fifth Ammendment does not cover hard drives. There's a battle going on involving the ex-Megaupload users and the FBI. And Dotcom has been denied bail. Guy Fawkes has been called upon again to defend piracy, this time in Poland parliament.
We got a Spectrum by LG in the house and have reviewed it in full. The Samsung Galaxy S III has been tipped, confirmed, and considered for release at Mobile World Congress 2012. Samsung's iPhone burn ad series continues. We've been slapped in the face. We've got a review of the ASUS Transformer Prime with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. We've got an unboxing and hands-on of the DROID RAZR MAXX with a review on the way. We've got a fight going on between Speck, Logitech, and Cygnett for the iPad 2. We got a hands-on look at Qualcomm AllJoyn.
Star Wars: The Old Republic gets a major update. You might want to get your tissues out again because Diablo III is getting more pre-release tweaks and a producer change. Good luck seeing that inside the first couple of quarters here in 2012. Saddest days!
There's a brand new Xbox 720 in the works with an AMD 6000 GPU and an inability to play used games. A Windows 8 based Kinect notebook has been spotted. Both Microsoft Xbox Live and Steam are coming to iOS and Android. Nintendo will be releasing the Wii U fabulously. We've got a review of the V-MODA Limited Edition Crossfade LP2 super deluxe over-ear headphones. We went hands-on with a Mercedes-Benz DICE interior concept as well as the new Mercedes-Benz mbrace2.
Facebook Timeline is now fully live and mandatory. Wikipedia is in works to become the world's free mobile website. Philip Berne wrote a lovely column about Booth Babes. Chemists have created the first envelopes for artificial life.
Evi turns up as a surprise hit in the Siri alternative world. Over 350,000 iBooks textbooks were downloaded in the first three days they existed. Half a million iPhone 4S users downloaded and loaded the brand new jailbreak that broke this week. Apple's secret packaging testing room has been revealed. More iPads than HP PCs have been sold in Q1 2012. Some fabulous new iPhone 5 specs have been leaked by a Foxconn worker. Chris Davies calls Apple TV an embarrassment while Don Reisinger spoke on what Apple TV needs to become more than a hobby – he also noted how he'd much rather have an Xbox 360.
We disprove Lytro on iPhones. On how well Nokia did this past quarter, Chris Davies noted that they bought time, That Clock Is Ticking. In the Windows Phone world we've got a Nokia Lumia 710 review while the much more fantastically spec'd Nokia Lumia 900 comes closer and closer to an LTE UK release. There's also a Nokia Lumia 910 coming up soon as well. The 2012 version of MIX for Microsoft Developers has been nixed for the year. So has BlizzCon 2012. There's also that teeny tiny Raspberry $25 PC edging closer and closer to reality. Alienware's 2012 lineup has been revealed.
Financial results came in from Verizon and the folks at Apple (complete with the most fantastic quarter for iPhone EVER.) There's a few Nokia financial results plus Netflix dropped their numbers down and AT&T jumped in too. Nvidia let loose their earnings as well.