Welcome to this week’s edition of the SlashGear Week in Review! If you are a PC hardware geek an AMD spokesman causally showed off an unannounced video card on Monday called the HD 6990. The card has dual GPUs and should be very fast. We heard a bit of early detail on the PSP2 from Nikkei that claimed the new portable would have an OLED touchscreen, 3G and a new CPU. That would make for a very impressive portable indeed.

NVIDIA will be sampling its new Tegra 3 T30/AP30 mobile quad core processors by the end of 2011. These things will bring a whole new breed of portable devices and more with loads of power. One of the coolest DIY projects I saw last week was the pedal-powered snowplow that a guy built. He used a couple old bikes and some wood to build the plow that appears to work pretty well.

The 10 billionth app was downloaded last weekend and Apple called the person who made the download to give the $10k gift card price that was offered. The catch was that the winner hung up on them. Luckily for her an Apple rep called again and she ended up with her gift. Samsung conducted a strange experiment early in the week where they launched a bunch of paper airplanes in space. They launched 200 paper planes from 36,500 meters above Berlin and each plane had a card with a text message that the folks who found it could enter online for others to read.

The Verizon iPhone 4 will cost the off-contract user $50 more on Verizon that it does on AT&T. The upside is that that extra $50 should let you talk without your call dropping if you hold your face wrong. The Acer Aspire One E100 Android netbook turned up this week and the thing dual boots Android and Windows. The netbook has a 10.1-inchscreen and is your basic netbook.

Notion Ink issued an update for the Adam tablet that was bricking some of the tablets that installed the update. The update was later pulled and only a few users were affected. It was confirmed this week that Verizon will offer a $30 unlimited data plan for the iPhone 4. The catch is that it’s a limited time offer and will go back to the normal tiered plan after a while.

NVIDIA unveiled a new video card this week called the GeForce GTX 560 Ti. The card promises to be 46% faster than the Radeon HD 6950 that is already on the market and the new GTX 560 Ti sells for about $250. Ben Heck took a flashlight with a crank, a USB charger, and some geek mojo to create a cool kinetic charger. The charger puts power into the battery of your phone as you turn the crank.

The tiny Compulab Trim Slice nettop turned up this week with Tegra 2 inside for desktop PC use. This thing would make a really good HTPC; it looks more like a memory card reader than a computer to me. Details on several new Samsung smartphones turned up this week including the Samsung Galaxy Ace, Fit, Gio, and Mini. The Ace is the coolest of them all with a 3.5-inch screen, 800MHz processor and more.

The HTC Facebook phone that we keep hearing about has been tipped to land at MWC next month. The phone will reportedly use the Facebook color scheme, branding, and push the Facebook news feed. An awesome 12-foot long DIY LED matrix display turned up mid-week. The thing is really cool and uses 512 blue LEDs to show your text message.

A Verizon BlackBerry outage rolled on mid-week and to start with the blame was placed on an update by Verizon. Apparently the outage spanned a number of states and users that were affected only received email in batches an hour or so apart. The Sony Xperia Play was the subject of a pre-release preview video this week. This is the PlayStation phone and the thing looks really cool.

Thursday the Sony PlayStation Suite and PS Store for Android devices landed. The store is for Android 2.3 and up devices and has a lot of cool games for mobile gamers to download and enjoy. The Sony NGP “Next Generation Portable” went official this week. The device is the PSP2 we have been hearing about for a while and has an ARM Cortex A9 processor, 5-inch OLED screen, and a lot more. This should be one seriously cool portable game console.

A “secret” AT&T unlimited data plan is available to keep iPhone users from migrating to Verizon. One user is claiming that when he called AT&T and threatened to go to Verizon they moved him to an unlimited data plan. Hulu is reportedly in talks within the video streaming site to change from a free offering that it is right now to a virtual cable operator where we would all have to pay to use the streaming service.

Scosche shipped its new version of the flipSYNC called the flipSYNC II this week. It is available for USB charging devices and Apple gear for about $20 and the new version has a larger USB plug. The dorkiest iPad accessory ever turned up late in the week called the Assero Defender. It’s like one of those reverse backpacks parents use to carry babies, but the Defender is for your iPad.

Details for pre-orders of the Verizon iPhone 4 were offered Thursday. Verizon is going for AT&T’s throat and is offering some big discounts if you trade in an AT&T iPhone. A 16GB iPhone 4 from AT&T will get you $280 off your Verizon iPhone. Thursday we heard that the Sony NGP console would come in both 3G and WiFi only versions. That is good news since many people have no desire for 3G if they will only use it in the house.

The FCC posted up the teardown pics of the Notion Ink Adam Friday. The Adam the FCC had used what appear to be handmade connections leading some to wonder about build quality. We know the specs on the Sony NPG, but we still don’t know the price. Some speculation has been that the console might cost around $600. Sony has said the NGP won’t be $599, but still hasn’t offered pricing yet.

Microsoft is reportedly working towards 16-core Atom processors. The 16-core Atom would apparently be an alternative to traditional CPUs inside servers. Thanks for reading this week’s edition, see you next time!

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The last Palm-branded holdout on Verizon’s inventory — the CDMA Pixi Plus — is now gone from the company’s online store, once again leaving the country’s largest carrier without a webOS option to be had. Of course, the Pre 2 has been lined up for release on Verizon for some time, but in light of the lukewarm reception the phone’s received so far, the coming webOS 2.0 upgrades for the older models, and the big news presumably coming out of HP’s early February event, we’d say they’re now dangerously close to releasing an obsolete device. For what it’s worth, Palm’s site insists that the new model’s still “coming soon,” but that had better happen on the double if they want to sell any of these things.

Verizon’s online store is now Palm-free; Pre 2 imminent? originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Sat, 29 Jan 2011 19:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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That rumor yesterday about Verizon dumping rebates on smartphones priced $150 or greater? Yep, it’s looking more legit than ever now that BGR‘s scored Big Red’s latest rebate form — and nearly all of the big-ticket smartphones are now gone. Also notable: the Droid 2 R2-D2, currently priced at $199.99, is on there with a $50 rebate, which suggests the phone could see a price drop to $149.99 on or around Monday. At the end of the day, you’ll be paying the same for most of these phones — but it’ll be nice to pay a little less upfront.

Latest Verizon rebate form confirms big-ticket rebates are going away originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Sat, 29 Jan 2011 17:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The grapevine did already hint at the timing of the Verizon iPhone 4 pre-orders, but now, to be absolutely sure nobody misses them, we have a countdown! Eager iPhone bandwagon jumpers will have to stay up till 3AM EST on February 3rd to get their orders in from a “reserved quantity” of handsets, which will be assigned on a first-come, first-served basis — presumably to be delivered on that February 10th launch date everyone’s been anticipating for so long. Sadly for Verizon newcomers, a contract with the network will be a prerequisite for signing up when the countdown expires.

[Thanks, Jarrett and Anthony]

Continue reading Verizon turns on iPhone 4 pre-order countdown, existing customers can order on February 3rd at 3AM

Verizon turns on iPhone 4 pre-order countdown, existing customers can order on February 3rd at 3AM originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 29 Jan 2011 01:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Oh Verizon, you guys so crazy. They’ve got splash screen after splash screen up on their iPhone site saying that Existing Customers will be allowed to ram their buttons down at exactly 3 AM EST on the third of February, 2011. The site will crash at that moment, and everyone will cry.

To see if you can find the images you see above and below this paragraph, head over to Verizon and do some soul searching. Be sure to sign up for updates, click around the site for hours, and sell your soul, because you’re gonna need the cash. The iPhone will cost you ladies and gentlemen $199 for 16GB and $299 for 32GB models, the data and talk plans starting at $70 total for 450 minutes and unlimited data. If you’d like to also be able to tether your laptop to your phone’s internet, you’ll be paying another $20 a month. Is it worth it?

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Seriously, Continuum owners, you couldn’t have possibly thought you dodged this bullet, right? Big Red’s pushing an update today that’s kind of a double-edged sword; on the one hand, you get a boatload of bug fixes to visual voicemail, messaging, WeatherBug, and more. But on the other hand, the update will automatically install V CAST Apps, Verizon’s app store, whether you like it or not. We’d like the option of choosing an update either with or without additional software on carrier-branded phones these days — but we suppose we can understand the complexities of forking updates like that. At any rate, this one’s over the air, so expect a notification from Verizon on your phone shortly.

Samsung Continuum gets software update, V CAST Apps along for the ride originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Fri, 28 Jan 2011 17:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple has released iTunes 10.1.2 for the Mac and PC, adding CDMA support in the latest update.  This is necessary for those who plan on buying Verizon’s iPhone 4 and have it sync properly with iTunes. The release didn’t specifically mention Verizon and only referred to an “iPhone 4 (CDMA model)” which has people speculating whether other CDMA carriers for the iPhone 4 may be in the near future.

The release also came with notes about AirPlay and the usual offerings of stability and performance improvements as follows:

iTunes 10.1.2 syncs music, movies, and more with iPhone 4 (CDMA model) and provides a number of important stability and performance improvements.

iTunes 10.1 came with several new features and improvements, including:

Use AirPlay to instantly and wirelessly stream videos from iTunes to the all-new Apple TV.

Sync with your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with iOS 4.2.

[Via 9 to 5 Mac]

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Verizon and AT&T can’t seem to stop fighting. They’ve fought over ads pretty extensively in the recent past. And the upcoming Verizon iPhone isn’t going to smooth any feathers. Instead, the two are gearing up for another public shouting match. AT&T’s 2010 numbers have lead some blogs to speculate that the carrier now beats Verizon.

Apparently, both companies count “subscribers” differently. AT&T considers every connected mobile device on their network to be a subscriber. That includes e-readers with dedicated market connections, iPad users, etc.

By contrast, Verizon counts each rate plan as a subscriber. They file everything else in the “other connections” category. If you add that in to Verizon’s subscriber total, they again beat AT&T. Which is probably why the latter didn’t exactly make a huge fuss out of “beating” their biggest rival.

This whole mess may have been a ploy by AT&T to get the tech blogs and news sites to advertise for them. Rather than calling themselves the biggest in an ad and immediately facing a lawsuit, AT&T goes with the subtle route and trusts word-of-mouth to spread the message.

Well two can play at that game. Verizon has just “leaked” a slide that reveals their total subscriber number: 102.2 million, nearly 7 million ahead of AT&T. Big Red also showed off their postpaid net adds for Q4, 872,000. Which is more than twice what AT&T managed.

The ball is in AT&T’s court now. Will they back down, or will iPhone madness lead these two titans into yet another multi-billion dollar slugging match?

[Via Droid Life]

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In the wake of a slew of not-so-fun changes in the wireless industry, here’s a way to end the month on a bright note: a rumor over on Android Central suggests that Verizon will be killing off its mail-in rebates for some devices in favor of lower sticker prices. Specifically, a leaked screen shot says that if the device runs more than $150, there won’t be any rebate at all; if it’s less and not a closeout, you’ll be dealing with a $50 rebate. Of course, the whole concept of a rebate is a little sneaky to begin with — the idea is that carriers can advertise lower prices, then get you to pay more at the counter and hope that you’ll fail to deal with the mail-in form that you’ve got to fill out; best-case scenario, they get to sit on your money for a few weeks while you wait for a gift card to show up in the mail. So yeah, our hearts wouldn’t be broken if this was accurate — as long as the new upfront prices completely erase those rebates, of course.

Verizon dumping some mail-in rebates, going with lower upfront prices instead? originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Fri, 28 Jan 2011 15:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Paying a monthly fee — or any fee, for that matter — for turn-by-turn navigation on Android devices has felt pretty unpalatable ever since Google Maps Navigation happened, but Verizon’s still trying to make things interesting with the latest version of its VZ Navigator product. A quick feature rundown of its new “Version X” is up on YouTube right now, and we’ll admit, we’re a little intrigued by some of this stuff: realistic 3D buildings in major cities (unlike the nondescript boxes in Google Maps, we imagine), some form of dead reckoning capability for those times that you don’t have GPS reception, satellite maps, overhead street signs, social integration for letting folks know where you are, and a whole bunch of views for customizing the experience. We’re assuming service is the same $9.99 a month that Big Red charges currently, but there’ll also be a free version — VZ Navigator Maps — that dispenses of some of the crazier features. We’re hearing this might be officially announced in a few hours, so more details will presumably be in tow; in the meantime, follow the break for the teaser video.

[Thanks, Misty]

Update: It’s official. Full PR after the break.

Continue reading VZ Navigator Version X breaks cover, adds ‘virtual city’ maps, social features, and more

VZ Navigator Version X breaks cover, adds ‘virtual city’ maps, social features, and more originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 Jan 2011 00:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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