Welcome to another edition of the SlashGear Week in Review. Moneaul Labs pulled a cool new chassis out of the shadows for people that are building up an HTPC for the living room. The chassis has LCD on the front so you can see widgets and other content from the PC called the Dual Screen PC case. We had a lot of news about the iPad two this week with the tidbit surfacing that the new tablet will have a multicore SGX543 GPU. That GPU claims to deliver twice the graphics power that the original iPad GPU has.
The PlayStation phone landed on another video preview this week. If you are really looking forward to the device the new video may be worth a watch. You may be familiar with aerogel, which is hailed as the world’s lightest solid material. Scientists used carbon nanotubes to make that material even lighter this week.
A crazy Taxi concept for NYC that is split with a tunnel down the middle was shown for a contest to find future taxi designs for the city. The taxi has split seats and the tunnel in the middle is to allow bicyclists to go through without changing lanes. The HTC 7 Pro finally went on sale in Germany last week. The smartphone hit O2 and carried a retail price working out to $39 with a new 2-year agreement or $796 without a contract.
Consumer Reports has no love for the iPhone 4, they have already pulled their recommendation for the AT&T iPhone before. The publication is now “cautious” on the new Verizon iPhone 4. We reviewed the Lenovo U260 IdeaPad Notebook early in the week. We really liked the machine and it starts at a very nice price, lacks tons of crap ware, and performs well.
An interesting app surfaced for the iPhone this week that is called iCar Black Box. The app is a recording program that comes on automatically when an accident is detected to record what happened. A cool new Swiss Army Knife with a secure SSD inside was spied. The new device is from Victorinox and has a 256GB SSD inside. A really cool concept Mercedes turned up this week that looks like the car Tron might drive if he had lots of money. It’s called the Blackbird Mercedes and it’s really cool.
A special BMW edition of the Lexia X1 camera turned up this week. The camera has nothing new to offer but a different finish and BMW stamped on it along with an extra $1000 tacked onto the price. The Sony PSP2 is set to land on January 27 and the PlayStaiton Phone will hit at MWC 2011 according to tips from insiders that were offered mid-week. The renders of the PSP2 I have seen look a lot like the PlayStation Phone.
Starbucks rolled its mobile payments solution out to all stores in the nation this week. You can now get the official Starbucks app and pay for your coffee using your Blackberry or iPhone. Verizon is offering some of its subscribers $200 back if they upgrade to the iPhone 4. The user had to buy a new phone in the month leading up to the iPhone 4 announcement and then has to pay full price and get $200 back on a Visa gift card.
The Nintendo 3DS has been talked to death and now we know that the console will hit the US on March 27 for $249.99. That seems really expensive to me for a portable game system. The Nintendo 3DS has hit pre-order on Amazon as well. The pre-order price is the $249.99 that I just mentioned.
A really cool Andorid Flip Phone with three flexible OLED screens turned up in concept from mid-week. The phone has a triangle design and was designed by Kristian Ulrich Larsen. Facebook for feature phones launched this week with free data use on some carriers. None of the free data carriers are in the US though.
The wholesale price of the Nintendo 3DS turned up in the UK this week. The portable console has a 1/3 markup meaning it has some profit built-in for sure. Google co-founder Larry Page is going to replace Eric Schmidt as the CEO of Google starting on April 4. Schmidt will be taking the Executive Chairman position within the company.
A hack for the Apple TV XBMC turned the cheap STB from Apple in to a 1080p media center. The hack uses the official Apple VideoToolBox API allowing 1080p for non-Apple streams. The Notion Ink Adam tablet finally started shipping last week and it turned up on an official unboxing. The box converts into a desk stand to prop the new tablet up.
Some evidence turned up in the latest iOS SDK that points to the rear camera on the iPad 2 having only 1MP resolution. That really makes no sense considering the much higher resolution cameras out there. The Razer Onza Xbox 360 controllers hit pre-order this week. The $49.99 Tournament edition sold out for pre-orders already but the normal version for $39.99 was available late last week.
The Holocube grew to have a much larger screen than the original. The new version was spied Friday with a 70-inch screen large enough to project a full size holographic human. Duke Nukem Forever has taken…forever… to get an actual launch date. The official trailer for the game was released Friday and it looks really cool.
The Ferrari FF was unveiled with four-seat design and a weird style that looks a lot like the four-seat Porsche Panamera. The car is ugly to me, but the four-seat Porsche has sold very well in the US making the Ferrari offering likely to be popular with the rich needing four seats. The App Store officially hit 10 billion apps downloaded. The lucky soul that made the magic download has $10K coming in a gift card from Apple.
