Gadgetory

this week on the cnet tech review our tour from the show floor at e3 the nintendo DS goes 3d how to use ebay like a pro and SoundHound sniffs out the name of that song that's stuck in your head it's all coming up right now hey everyone I'm Molly wood and welcome to the cnet tech review the show where we rundown the hottest videos of the week and tell you which are good which are bad and offer some tech wisdom in the form of the bottom lines let's start with the good another Electronic Entertainment Expo has come and gone at this year's e3 show Microsoft tried to connect with Xbox fans Nintendo put 3d gaming in players hands and sony ps3 gamers were on the move of course cnet was there to cover at all here's Bryant on with his report from the show floor from way downtown Los Angeles for cnet TV I'm gym kit rose saying NBA Jam is back boom shakalaka brian song here with CNN com on the show floor to e3 2010 we saw a lot of themes here this year we saw 3d gaming most controlling is here and here to stay and retro gaming is making a comeback we're here inside Nintendo's booth and you can see behind me everyone is getting their hands on the Nintendo 3ds now we really can't show you the screen because it doesn't do justice and you won't be able to see how good it looks but there's a reason there are huge lines here to get their hands on this little new toy I know you guys can't see what I'm playing but i'm playing with the 3d version of intent dogs and this dog is very cute now 3d is not only going to be on a little handheld the sony ps3 has pushed it hard with Killzone 3 we're here inside of Sony's PlayStation booth and another theme that we've seen here that is HUGE is motion based gaming so here in my hand I got the PlayStation Move if you guys want your ultimate pics of 3d gaming and motion gaming well this is the place to be put on my shades cuz this game time if you like motion control gaming but you don't want to controller check out Microsoft's Kinect where your body is the controller now we've all heard the same what's old is now new and that same thing holds true with gaming with classics coming back like Mortal Kombat and NBA jam we had a game so many years ago in NBA jam that was truly like the most raucous horsepower high-energy octane game ever made and if you look back at it it's one step removed really from the early pong and art re kind of things I think there was something magic about the 90s and people playing video games you know a lot of people were probably in you know high school grade school or something like that and so seeing old games with the new presentation with a hardware and the technology that we have today there's something nostalgic about that so is a combination of nostalgia and you know the new so I think it's a great combination so at e3 2010 we saw a lot of great new announcements for hardware we saw a lot of great games I'm just gonna enjoy the show floor let's hope I can make it out of here alive don't worry I'm told BT made it out just fine of course I haven't seen him in a couple of days but anyway for even more of our extensive III coverage including more highlights from the big 3 game makers press conferences head over to cnet TV com or just stick around until a little later in the show of course with all those new games coming out you might want to consider getting rid of some of your old ones want to sell them on ebay tell them how Josh hey I'm Josh Lowensohn for cnet and today I'm going to show you how to sell things on eBay eBay is a great place to pawn off potentially high value items like cell phones or game consoles especially if you don't feel like doing the whole face to face thing on craigslist as an example I'm going to use a mobile phone to get started you need an account on eBay which is free after signing up click on the cell link at the top of the screen then the big blue start selling button ebay will then ask you some key words about your phone or device all you have to do here is type in phone or whatever you're selling then hit the big search button on this next screen I'm going to pick cell phones and smartphones and hit the big blue continue button again then I'm going to type in the brand or model of my phone to see if it's an ebays database once you've found the model of your phone or gadget just select it and you'll be taken to the most important page of all the one where you tell buyers about your item and how much you're selling it for to get a good idea of what kind of price is set do a search to see what other similar items have sold for it's also worth setting a reserve price at or a little bit below the number so you can make sure it won't sell for less than you're willing to part with choosing this option will cost you anywhere from two dollars to one percent of your reserve price if it's over two hundred dollars a few things that help in the way of attracting prospective buyers is to take some photos of your item in all likelihood ebay already has a stock photo from the manufacturer but a picture of your device or whatever accessories you're selling with can go a long way towards making your buyers more confident just keep in mind ebay charges 15 cents for each additional photo beyond the first one so use them sparingly you'll also want to be dead honest about your items description if there are any problems with the device things like scratches cracks water damage or a dying battery should be stated upfront otherwise you could end up with negative feedback and an angry buyer another thing to keep in mind is that you'll need a paypal account if you intend to do an electronic payment this is the best route if you want to get paid immediately signing up for paypal is free but they do take a cut of a payment if you're on a premier or business account which is required to take credit card transactions though if your buyer is also a paypal user it will be free on both ends as for when to set your auction end time the longer you have it on the site the better the chances are someone will see it and add it to their watch list you'd also be wise to time it to end in the late afternoon or early evening on a weekday since that's when the most bidding activity happens once it's up you just have to sit there and wait it out don't be scared of nobody bids on it in the first few days as most of the action happens in the last few hours and when it's all said and done be sure to ship it out in a timely manner you can use these instructions to sell just about anything on the site though the one downside is that eBay can charge some pretty steep fees on top of what you paid to list your item if your item doesn't sell in an auction you don't pay a thing but if it does ebay takes nine percent of the final value up to fifty dollars i'm josh lowensohn this has been a how-to on how to sell your stuff on ebay good luck selling those old gadgets and now that you know some of the tricks the power sellers use I bet you can figure out how to use them to be a better buyer to moving on in the good one of my first favorite iphone apps was Shazam you just hold your phone up hit tag now and boom you've got the name of the song and the artist who sings it most of the time anyway well with this new app called soundhound you don't even need to be listening to a song to ideate seriously take a look ever hear a song playing that you've just gotta have or got a tune stuck in your head that you can't place sound town is an app for iphone and android that can ID those songs I'm Jessica dual-core from cnet download.com taking a look at SoundHound like other apps SoundHound can identify a recorded song as it plays after just a few seconds but unlike its biggest rival SoundHound can also tag music that you sing hum type or speak into the phone after searching you'll see a plethora of information about the artist or song including the artist bio related songs and videos and an opportunity to buy the song or share a link to the song via email or Twitter one of the apps best features is providing a list of lyrics if they're available if they're not soundhound will link you to a Google search for the song's lyrics the iphone version of SoundHound is much more advanced than the android version when you buy a song it will pop you right into the itunes library for easy ordering soundhound on android whisks you to the amazon.com music store online that could change when Google releases its own music store as early as this fall soundhound on iphone also has the added bonus of hooking into your running ipod and providing an artist bio song information and all the other goodies including song lyrics for songs that you already own we hope that sound hound will soon add the android media player in tunes android app there are two versions of sound hound for both Android and iPhone the free version cuts off tagging after five songs per month when you record sing or hum into the app but there's no cap to searching with your voice or by text these apps are also ad supported the premium versions called SoundHound infinity costs a one-time fee of 499 and give you unlimited song IDs and no ads I'm Jessica's all court and you've been looking at sound home for Android and iPhone yeah I'm gonna have to bribe our producer Jamie to get a clip of Jessica sing in that video see on youtube Jessica alright we have one more good thing for you today a desktop computer awesome right actually this little Dell is a pretty good bargain but you better act fast hi I'm rich brown senior editor for cnet com today we're going to take a look at the dell studio XPS 7100 so this is a mid-range performance PC and this particular config has a fixed price it's 1149 at least until the end of july and for that price you get an excellent deal in a mid-tower gaming system it comes with a blu-ray drive wireless networking a six core AMD chip as well as a very fast radeon HD 5870 graphics card it's not quite as fast as some other pcs in its price ranges in terms of application performance but for gaming it's one of the best deals we've seen all year until makes a distinction with this system from its other intel-based studio XPS models with the dark grey front panel now the front you get a media card reader up top there's a blu-ray drive here this door slides down and you get a couple of USB jacks and a top here you get a little device tray with a couple USB ports and analog audio inputs as well you can see the graphics card has got two DVI video outputs as well as hdmi and displayport because it's a radeon card you can do up to three displays at one time off of the single card there's also a couple of wireless antenna Jack's here for wireless networking and on the motherboard you've got a digital audio output a SATA port a couple USBS ethernet as well as 7.1 analog audio jacks now missing our firewire as well as USB 3.0 which is sort of a newer faster data input that we expect will become common probably by the end of the year maybe into next year so it's not crucial that it's on this system there aren't that many devices out there that support USB 3 and firewire is actually getting a little bit long in the tooth still we've seen other desktops that offer the whole gamut of inputs so there might be a few other inputs you could add for the most part Dells covered in spaces so it's a little crowded inside the XPS 7100 there's a dual-slot graphics card right here that's the radeon 5870 and you can see dell is a nice thick bracket to keep the card in place and shipping that's a nice touch but it also sort of blocks this extra hard drive bay so Dell is expanded typical design and added a second drive slot here behind the drug the hard drive you see right here that's great we're glad that you can add a second drive we would still probably prefer if dealt face the drives outwards or like we've seen in some newer pcs through the front so item drives in through the front of the case makes hot swapping upgrading changing drives really simple and we're hoping that becomes a standard as well there's a six core cpu here from AMD and for expansion slots there's the graphics card wireless card and then there's one standard pci slot down here on the bottom that's it there's no second graphics card slot a really room for upgrading is pretty limited you can see the memory slots are all taken as well so if you want an upgrade foundation this might not be the config for you that said it's still a pretty great deal concerning get blu ray wireless as well as a super-fast with 3d card for under 1,200 bucks so Delson is the price fez configuration will stay until the end of july at that price and with this specific feature set this is an outstanding system the price changes you might want to do some more comparison to see how it stacks up to other pcs in the market but for now for any gamer looking for a mid-range performance PC we absolutely recommend the system sign rich brown this is the dell studio XPS 7100 that's so nice of Tracy's dad from flash forward to stop by and review that for us right Hey look so much alike Oh fine I know nobody watched that show now it's cancelled but I liked it and they do look alike all right let's take a break while I try to find a new favorite TV show but don't go anywhere the bad stuff is just around the corner when we come back welcome back to the cnet tech review your weekly digest of all things good and bad from cnet TV now let's go back to e3 for some of the bad during Microsoft's Xbox 360 press conference on Monday they spend a lot of time showing off all the cool things that you can do with Kinect unfortunately they were using Microsoft engineers for many of the demos let's take a look as Laura runs us through something called video kinect now with the net the same magic that allows you to control your xbox 360 with your voice also allows you to communicate with people you care about this is video kinect and here to help me show it to you is laura one of the engineers we're building social experiences on xbox live hey Laura hey Mark what I love about kinect is that it's not just about video games the sensor also lets me video chat with my friends and family and the microphone lets me do that without a headset so let me show you an example of what video kinect will look like here are my friends some of them are an xbox live and some are on windows live messenger and here on this page are a bunch of my relatives my parents my brother and his wife and my twin sister Kristen Kristen lives in texas and i live in seattle the video chat is a great way to keep in touch we sent kristin is sensor so that you can help me demo this today so let's call her up hey Kristin how's it going hey pretty good and busy with work I can see you're busy too yeah i'm here at e3 everyone say hi to Kristen hey everybody so we finally get to show everyone what you've been working on yeah I'm pretty excited about that so here's a few things that you haven't seen yet one thing we can do is watch stuff together you see those topics at the bottom of your screen yeah I can select one of them and we can watch a video together chosen few hey that's the last airbender wasn't there a video game about that yeah there was my coworkers played it just to boost their gamerscore maybe you should do the same thing what's my gamerscore is one hundred percent legit Yeah right okay well this video is great what we're going to move on now another cool thing that connect can do is track you as you move around you should give that a try okay Wow hey that's pretty cool it's following me so how does not work so here's a slightly geeky answer connect tracks your skeleton as you knew so they can follow you and keep you in the shot it happens automatically so don't have to adjust the camera myself nope we're trying to keep it simple there's one more thing I want to show you ready yeah so to do that I got it in the video chat so you should say goodbye to everyone alright bye everybody thanks for helping us out today y'all ready Xbox in chat hey Clark oh my goodness that was so painful and also how do we know that that's her twin sister and not just the same girl in a wig although I do have to give the folks playing kinect sports a few extra points for enthusiasm oh those crazy kids those crazy awkward kids all right next up is a brand new 3d TV from Panasonic wait now wasn't this actually our best of CES award winner from this year hmm well let's watch there must be a reason it's in the bag this week hi I'm David Katz mark from cnet and I'm sitting next to the panasonic tc-p 50v t25 this is a 50 inch flat panel plasma TV the smallest in Panasonic's flagship VT 25 sirree there's also a 54 58 and 65-inch member of the series as well as a 50 inch model to best buy exclusive that has a silver bezel called the VT 20 otherwise it's basically identical in fact all these are basically identical which is why this review will apply to all sizes this is a Panasonic's 3d TV for 2010 it's a plasma model and has some advantages over some LCD based 3d TVs we've tested we'll get to that in a little bit but first 3d TV in general you do require specialized 3d content blu-ray discs for the highest quality there's also some channels on directv and a lot more coming soon but for now content is pretty limited you also need to use 3d glasses to view the 3d content on its TV the Panasonic comes with one pair of those glasses the additional pairs cost $150 right now although we do expect them to drop in price but of course it does cost a lot of money to outfit your entire family for 3d viewing again we'll talk about a little bit about the 3d performance in a bit but first this is a fully functional 2d TV and of styling on it is a pretty slick this VT 25 series has the bronze bezel it's slightly different from the standard glossy black you'll find it's also got a little bit of silver above and below and course some silver accents on the swivel stand here and all in all we really like the appearance of this TV aside from 3d the main features on this flagship TV include panasonic viera cast which is a IPTV solution that includes a netflix amazon video on demand twitter fox sports are coming soon Netflix won't be available until july this year and a lot of the other content is sparser than some of the other internet connected TVs around we do like the fact that you can adjust some of the arrangements within the VIERA CAST menu which is a new feature for 2010 there's also the ability to hook up a keyboard so if you like to Twitter from your TV you'll like that feature flagship model Panasonic did equip the VT 2025 with a good selection of picture adjustments in the custom setting when you go into custom you can play with the pro settings which involves a lot of color temperature adjustments a full color management system gamma and a few others the THX mode on this TV which we did find was the best overall isn't all that adjustable however of course it does start out pretty good so it's not really a big issue there's also a few 3d settings on this TV but it's not as extensive and adjustment selections you can find on samsung's 3d TVs which also include a up conversion system to convert 2d to 3d again Panasonic doesn't include that system in this model connectivity on the VT 25 is fairly extensive around back to find a 3 HDMI inputs to component video inputs a pc input there's also this rs-232 port here only on the VT 25 not on the VT 20 series that's used for connection to custom installation systems side panel has a fourth HDMI input an issue an SD card slot and a couple of USB jacks one of those is nice if you buy the optional Wi-Fi dongle which is useful for you don't want to connect ethernet cable to the back of the TV the Wi-Fi dongle does cost a hundred bucks though when we took the Panasonic into the lab we were very impressed by its 3d and its 2d picture quality will start with 3d though compared to the Samsung which is the only owner when we've tested the panasonic with superior in terms of reducing crosstalk which are these sort of ghostly doubled images that you can see sometimes in certain material a lot more crosstalk on the samsung than we saw in the panasonic both exhibited excellent detail and give you a really good stereoscopic 3d effect of course smaller screen size and a couple of other issues are different from the theater but in general it's very satisfying illusion but the real story here is the 2d picture quality at least until 3d becomes a lot more common 2d on the Stevie's among the best we've ever tested it starts with the excellent black level performance when you turn down the lights and watch a relatively dark seen those blacks are really inky and really help improve the pop and overall saturation the entire picture speaking of saturation the color on this he is very good not quite as good as some of the very best models we tested but in THX mode color accuracy gets really good skin tones and again plenty of saturation and pop we did find some issues with the 1080p 24 it does have excellent cadence which does take advantage of the film based blu rays and dvds but on the other hand we did see some slight false contouring artifacts but again we did prefer to use the 1080p 24 mode on this TV which is labeled 96 hurts we also appreciated the standard picture quality advantages of plasma which include very good off angle and picture uniformity panasonic also improved the anti-glare screen on this model so it does preserve black levels as well as reduce reflections better than previous panasonic plasmas that's a quick look at the panasonic tc-p VT 20 / 25 series and I'm David Katz Meyer oh yeah now I remember one pair of 3d glasses am I really going to spend 3 grand on a TV so I can sit and watch it all by myself I don't think so which brings us to this week's bottom line as we saw in Brian's video earlier 3d gaming is coming whether you like it or not now Nintendo skipped adding 3d to the wii this year instead giving us the new 3d s Brian got his hands on one long enough to give us this first look this is Nintendo 3d yeah right Tonya Messina calm and this in my hand is a first look at the Nintendo 3ds now you guys can't see this but this it's awesome a look at this doesn't require any 3d glasses whatsoever you're looking at a 3.5 inch widescreen 3d panel on the top again no glasses required you also get a few different controls you have this analog stick over here on the left side you'll get the standard d-pad and the controls you see the standard camera here at the top on top of the screen but if we flip it around to the back you'll actually notice two additional cameras that will allow you to take 3d pictures of yourself and then watch them here on the 3ds also you have here on this far left-hand side you have a slider that actually lets you turn either the three function on or off and even change the depth of the 3d now this is just a little gameplay sample we can't actually play any games on this unit they're just showing a video sample but a head on this looks pretty amazing in something that we just haven't seen before there's no pricing on the 3ds we don't know when it'll be released yet but there you have it this this is awesome stuff is going to change things a little bit I'm Brian Thomas netcom with your first look at the Nintendo 3ds the bottom line this week that's how you do 3d no glasses year me Panasonic and that is our show for this week everyone tune in next week when we will continue iphone 4 madness as the new phone goes on sale I hope our pre order went through until then don't be afraid to check out more great seen that video at seen at tv.com see you next time and thank you for watching