Gadgetory

the annual Consumer Electronics Show might not officially start for a few more days but the new tech products are out in full force from the newest and smartphones to processors to laptops and literally everything in between CES always brings great announcements and this year has been no exception let's get this one started one look in spring designs new ereader the Alex and you'll swear it's a clone of the Barnes & Noble no that's a bit of a sore subject it seems both companies think and the other copy the idea from each other but regardless the alex is one slick piece of hardware it sports a nicely sized color touchscreen below the standard e-ink display but instead of using a fully skinned an unrecognizable operating system you'll have no problem figuring out that the Alex runs Android as the UI looks practically unchanged from any normal Android phone seeing as it runs a very close to stock version of Android that means it has many features that you would expect on a smart phone such as a browser email client music app and of course ebooks the Alex seems to leverage the fact that it has to screams much better than on the nookie instead of walling content into one screen or the other it's fairly open for example you can be reading a web page on the bottom color touchscreen and have a refresh after a short pause on the e-ink display another major problem of the Nook speed doesn't seem to be an issue in the Alex it zips between pages with decent speed although of course nothing compared to a powerful smartphone by literally it's not bad the e-reader is also very thin which is always good the Alex looks like a fantastic reader at first glance but there are still details that need to be worked out will come with free 3G like that Kindle and the Nook what kind of battery life will get and most importantly how much will it cost are questions that will be answered before too long assuming no bad surprises are on the way the Alex will god it could be the next big new eater one of the most exciting things to come out of CES so far is lenovo's new laptop prototype the IdeaPad u1 at first glance it looks like a standard small laptop or even netbook with average specs that include an 11 inch display and a low powered Core 2 Duo processor but then comes the twist the screen detaches and morphs into a full touchscreen tablet you aren't right simply unclip the screen from the laptop and the tablet portion of the computer will kick in inside the screen is a 1 gigahertz Snapdragon processor that runs a custom tablet version of Linux no complicated switching process is necessary either just pull the screen loose and the laptop portion goes to sleep and the tablet turns on one of the best parts is that if you're browsing the web the tablet will jump straight to whatever website you were looking at as you would expect considering that the screen conceals the guts of a computer it does add a bit of heft to the laptop considering that you have a full tablet built-in it's certainly not a bad trade-off the tablet utilizes a full multi-touch screen that while a bit finicky right now gives you access to several panels for accessing different functions for example there's already a built-in Gmail application along with one for YouTube as well as Facebook what's more likely on the way by the time the idea of head launches there are quite a few questions at this point but one of the most important ones price looks to be one of the computer strongest points lenovo plans to sell the idea that you one will right around $1,000 which looks great considering that the Apple tablet is expected to go for upwards of seven to eight hundred dollars and obviously won't come bundled for the MacBook in the deal the computer is planned to be on sale by June by which time the kinks should be worked out personally I think this is a fantastic solution to the problem of tablet computing but we'll see once they get it in a bit more sorted before for now though it looks like the surprise hit at CES 2010 and that's it for this special CES 2010 episode of inside tech be sure to subscribe to keep up to date with all the latest tech news from CES and beyond thanks for watching and we will catch you later