SlashGear Week In Review - Week 51 2010
Welcome to the first post Christmas Week in Review! I hope you had a great Christmas, let's get right to it. We heard Monday that wireless carriers were openly looking at ways that they can charge users a fee per service. It seems like a scheme to get user to take advantage of the sponsored services that the carrier offers rather than using third party services. Carrier services are expected to be offered free while things like YouTube would cost 50 cents monthly.
A doctoral candidate student has written a dissertation over the effects that MMORPG games have on college students. The study found that some students lose sleep and don't eat to play their games and a large portion admits that games interfere with studies and work. A really sweet electric racing motorcycle surfaced this week called the Mission R. The bike is capable of 160mph and has a 141hp electric motor.
We reviewed the Nokia X3-02 Touch and Type mobile phone this week. We figure the thing isn't perfect but it will satisfy most mainstream users. We reviewed the Google Cr-48 Chrome OS notebook computer early in the week. This is a strange rig where the hardware will never be sold and the software is what the story is about and we figure there is a lot to do before the OS launches next year.
Pioneer unveiled a set of white DJ gear this week. The hardware is a pearl white version of the CDJ-350 and DJM-350 that debuted in black back early in 2010. They FCC voted to enact some net neutrality rules this week and the vote was commented on by Woz, Verizon, and others. Naturally, the carriers hated the rules and others loved the new regulations.
A pic of a dude holding what appears to be a mini iPad surfaced this week. The guy holding the supposed mini iPad is some sort of racecar driver. I call shenanigans. Elliptic Labs showed off a cool touchless iPad dock that uses gestures to control the dock. The gesture interface of the dock will be shown off at CES next month.
We were sent some pics of what is supposedly some shots of a new HTC smartphone. The pics are suspected to be the HTC Incredible HD and would be a 4G device. GM announced early in the week that it is recycling the oil booms used to clean up the oil spill in the gulf in the production of plastic parts for the Volt. The plastic is being used to make the radiator covers for the car.
Chinese researchers devised a way to store data inside bacteria this week. The catch was that the bacteria could mutate and lose data and getting the data out was expensive and tedious. A crazy app for the iPhone launched called NoseDial. The app lets you dial the smartphone using your nose for folks in areas where they have to wear gloves.
The Nokia N900 got its own port of Android 2.3 this week. The port came from a dude going by DrunkDebugger and isn't quite 100% functional but offers core features like WiFi, Audio, and others. A great tragedy happened when the infamous and uber geeky Tron Guy was barred from watching Tron: Legacy in his Tron suit. Apparently, the theater thought it would be distracting.
Skype went down leaving hoards of users without the ability to make calls and video chat mid-week. The outage started at about 3:30 on Wednesday and affected users in the US, Asia, and Europe. Skype was still having issues on Thursday, but was back online with 30% of its normal user base having access to the service. The downtime was blamed on a supernode issue.
Logitech stopped the production of its Revue Google TV box this week. The device will apparently go back into production when a new version of Google TV software lands. The Nokia N900 got the ability to control the sweet Parrot AR.Drone flying machine that was an iPhone only controlled device until now. I still think the AR.Drone is the coolest accessory for a smartphone ever.
A patent app from Canon surfaced this week that shows a really cool way the company is looking to take advantage of NFC equipped smartphones. Canon wants to use the NFC device as a display screen for your DSLR when shooting pics. High-end and crazy expensive home theater and audio gear maker Bang & Olufsen unveiled a new home theater remote this week called the Beo6. Apparently, it adds some new controls along with WiFi.
I always thought those tubes that they use at banks for sending things through the drive through were cool. A concept tube travel system for people and equipment called ET3 has been unveiled that would allow you to travel from New York to Beijing in two hours at 4000mph and it reminds me a lot of those bank drive though systems. This sounds really out there to me. Thanks for reading this week's edition!