Gadgetory

this week on the cnet tech review Samsung's latest 4g phone is truly epic a new digital pen that can read your handwriting we've got an external hard drive that's fire and waterproof and we count down the top-5 cat videos on youtube it's all coming up right now hi everyone I'm Hollywood and welcome to the cnet tech review where we collect our hottest videos of the week and tell you what's good and what's bad in the world of tech plus we offer some unique tech wisdom in the form of the bottom line let's start with the good Sprint's 4G service is still being rolled out around the country but you don't have to wait to enjoy the many fancy features of a 4g phone or spend a ton of cash to do so take a look at the epic 4g from Samsa I'm Nicole Lee senior associate editor for cnet.com in this is a cluster 50 samsung epic 4g for sprint nextel the epic 4g has the most features and is the most advanced phone out of the samsung galaxy s family as you can see here it is the only galaxy s phone to have a physical keyboard 4G and a front-facing camera it is also the only one with a flash LED on the back the overall design is very solid it feels very install it in the hand and is a quite a large footprint that because on the front is a very generous and very colorful 4 inch Super AMOLED touchscreen display it is absolutely stunning vibrant and brilliant he has a very wide viewing angle and as higher contrast ratios when compared to ordinary LCD displays aside from YouTube and your own videos the samsung epic 4g will also have access to samsung's upcoming media hub that lets you rent and purchase movies TV shows and other content we don't know yet who the content partners are however the epic 4g is also the only one where you can download media hub content via Wi-Fi as well as 4g like the other galaxy s phones the epic 4g comes with the new touchwiz 3.0 interface this includes new widgets like feeds and updates for all your social networking content and buddies now which acts like a favorites list for all your contacts instead of a scrolling menu left with other android phones you get a great view with lateral panels the phone slides open to reveal a full curly keyboard which we like a lot it's spread out evenly across the phone thanks to the phones sighs we really appreciate the physical keys for the usual Android controls on the side here as an alternative to the touch-sensitive controls underneath the display the overall keyboard is really nice and tactile and it's easily one of the best keywords you've ever tried that's it the virtual keyboard is great to you especially with swype there's a five-point Omega pixel camera on the back which takes great photos especially with the LED flash the epic 4g comes with android 2.1 which of course brings the usual google features like gmail and google maps the epic 4g is also upgradeable to android 2.2 in the future other features of the phone include Wi-Fi video read a 4 3g and 4g webex were available as we said there's a front-facing camera on the front here so you can use it with quick and fring video calling services other services on the phone include sprint services like spritz zone nascar sprint mobile and more the epic 4g also has a 1 gigabits hummingbird processor which keeps it running along very smoothly you will also be able to use the smartphone as a mobile hotspot 3g or 4g for up to five devices the epic for it is available for two hundred and fifty dollars with a new two-year service agreement and after a hundred dollar mail-in rebate like the evo 4g however there is a ten dollar extra fee for the data plan that ten dollars extra gives you 4g access as well as access to premium data services i'm the coldest it's been the first look at the samsung epic 4g yeah it is kind of bulky but that giant slide out keyboard is huge and therefore awesome I think I love that phone actually to an epic degree next up we've got a pen yes a pen the kind you write with also the kind that talks to you and puts all your notes on the internet here's Donald bell with a Livescribe echo hey I'm Donald Bell and today we're taking a first look at the Echo smartpen from Livescribe pen comes in a 4 gigabyte version for 169 dollars in an 8 gigabyte model for 199 you get the pen and ink refill to pen caps a USB cable and a pad a special paper that's required to make it work so why spend up to two hundred dollars on a glorified ballpoint pen well the echo has three ingredients that make it special there's a microphone for recording audio a speaker for playing back recordings and the camera hidden in the tip that captures your pen movements you pair it up with the special paper and you have the ability to take notes and record sound at the same time it could be a college lecture or an interview or maybe you just like to brainstorm and doodle at the same time so here's the magic trick when it's time to review your notes the timeline of the audio recording is synced to what you wrote down so just tap a section and the audio from that moment plays back through the speaker or the standard headphone jack on the top a USB port is also on the top of the pen that you can use to sync your notes and recordings back to any Mac or PC you'll need to download the free Livescribe desktop software to make it work but then you can export notes as AAC audio and image file PDF or as a pen cast file you also have the option of uploading the pen cast to an online locker where it can be share it online or embed it into a web page the same software also allows you to download and install applications that run on the pen such as dictionaries games and travel phrases for different languages overall the echo smartpen is very impressive if perfectly tracked all our notes and is smart enough to know when you start a new page or when you write down a new note while listening back to a recording is there catch well you do have to use a special paper which you can print out yourself on a color printer or buy for around five dollars a notebook the cool thing about the notebook though is that you get all these little shortcut controls for the pen and recording settings a calculator and quick buttons for record pause stop skip audio bookmarks a timeline bar for jumping around the audio playback speed and volume control the pen refills are unique to it's just regular ink but the cartridges are shorter than average so they run out a little faster a five pack of refills is like five dollars so no biggie but they can be inconvenient to track down when you're in a pinch also you have to keep an eye on battery life mileage will vary depending on how high you have the display brightness and recording quality settings but if you use this on a daily basis expect to charge it daily as well finally remember it's a pen people tend to lose pens the echo can be personalized with the name and the content can be password protected but ultimately if you tend to lose pens this isn't the way to go that said on its merits as a pen alone the echo should satisfy those who are picky about those kinds of things compared with the first generation model called the pulse the echo has a lighter more tapered design better balance and a flat edge that keeps it from rolling off tables so that's the echo smartpen a genuinely novel and useful approach for capturing and reviewing audio and handwritten notes the cnet com I'm Donald Bell now if it only came with a disposable pen cap for you to chew on in class I don't want to get slobber in my USB port you storage prices have been plummeting recently with terabyte hard drives going for less than a hundred bucks in fact the data on your drive is probably more valuable than the drive itself so it might be worth spending a few extra bucks to protect your files backing up is important however in case of fire flood most of your bike up dries won't survive unless you have what I'm going to show you today hello my name is Domino and this is the solo pro fireproof waterproof external hard drive from iosafe the i would say solo bro is not external hard drive for everyone is huge and it's very heavy about 15 times the weight of a normal external hard drive is also comparatively expensive costing around two hundred fifty dollars for one tear by a foreign trade dollar for to tailor by to make up for this is come with layers of protection desire to guarantee the survival of your data even under extreme heat and water submersion according to ioc of the solo pro can protect the data against extreme heat up to 1500 degrees Fahrenheit and we're a submersion down to 10 feet for three days why we don't have the resources to test the drive in the extreme condition i will save haven't shown as many live demonstration to prove the effectiveness of their disaster-proof drives other than that this is a simple search solution on the front the solo has a large blue LED light that showed the power status this light flashes to show the hard drives activities on the back it has one you speed through pengal port a small ventilation fan and an on-off switch you can also buy a solo pro with an e SATA port but then you have to lose the USB 3.0 port unfortunately there's no option to have a more than one type connection the solo pro comes with just one USB through panco cable and nothing else however it shipped with one year warranty that includes iosafe data recovery service which take care of getting there back for you in case of disaster in case the hard drive is so badly damaged by fire or water and an expensive forensic light recovery service is required the warranty will cover up to 2500 dollars of the cost customer can also upgrade to a three or five year warranty for 50-100 dollars respectively for more information check out the in-depth review etsy.com once again my name is demo and this has been the first look at the iowa save solo pro fireproof waterproof external hard drive from Iowa Oh dome I'm disappointed I really want to see you break out your flamethrower or at least pop that baby in a fish tank all right now it's time to check in with jason parker to find out which apps the team is tapping this week hello and welcome to tap that app i'm jason parker and this is the show where we cover the hottest apps in the mobile space this week we're showing off a trifecta of iphone games that are fun challenging and easy to pick up and play and no we're not talking about Angry Birds now this week we're talking about skee-ball flick kick football in Star duck to get started skee ball has been in the itunes app store for more than a year now but remains an excellent way to waste a little time wherever you are just like arcades of old the object of skee-ball is to flick 10 balls down an alley and try to land them in cups with different score values hitting lit cups add to your bonus and when you're done you can even spend your winnings on cheap trinkets and other items in the loot shop skee-ball is a lot of fun it is 99 cents at the iTunes App Store the skee-ball is not your thing check out flick kick football this game challenges you to flick a soccer ball into a goal around stationary defenders and sometimes a moving goalkeeper as it progress through the game you'll need to hit skill shots near the edges of the goal to earn extra lives so miss shots won't end your game you can even do curve shots to kick the ball around defenders with a curved swipe your finger flick kick football is surprisingly fun and challenging the more you play and you can get it at the app store for just 99 cents our third grade pick up and play game is star dunk a basketball shooting game with an arcade twist shoot a basket by touching and moving your finger on the touchscreen to adjust your shot trajectory then let go to shoot hitting all four bars on the backboard gives you a random bonus that can make the hoop wider or let you shoot multiple balls at once as you progress you'll be able to unlock an experiment with different balls with unique properties to see what works best for you best of all you can play online against other players in a minute and a half long shoot out to see who gets the high score star dunk has no actual slam dunks but is definitely fun in a steal at 99 cents to sum it up let's face it some iphone games are made for those times you need a quick time waster in each of these three games fit the bill nicely if you're an iPhone user i recommend tapping all three of these apps that's it for this week's show if you have any suggestions send them to tap that app at cnet com i'm jason parker and we'll see you next week I don't care what you say Jason I love Angry Birds but maybe these games will help tide me over until the next levels are released come on already alright it's time to take a break I don't know about you but I am going to use this time to hunt down some more little green pigs we'll be right back with more Cena tech review right after this welcome back to the cnet tech review our weekly video digest of all things good and bad we've seen here at cnet TV continuing on with the good just because Apple is in a big fight with adobe / flash that doesn't mean all of Adobe's products are forbidden you can still use Photoshop on your Mac you could edit video with premier if you really want to and now Scott's time is here to show you how to read your PDF files on your iPad hi I'm Scott Stein senior associate editor at cnet com and we're going to show you how to get PDF books onto your iPad now the reason we're bringing this up is because the iPads a fantastic ereader there are a number of ear reading software options on there ibooks the kindle barnes and nobles app and and more in fact and they're all compelling and they're all great except for there's a question of unless you're purchasing them how do you get stuff onto it from outside well you may already know that if you have an ePub file but what if it's something else in fact what if it's something that you've written I'm a writer and other people may be two or you may have documents you want to bring on there and glance that as well well for that PDFs are much easier way to use the e-reader functions on your iPad then epub while there are some other great PDF readers as well including good reader for 99 cents a very diverse program that allows you to also import directly from the web or even from google docs it can go on to the file server and pull the documents down I books is a lot easier in the sense that it's built in already and it actually looks really nice and pretty will admit it step 1 and maybe the most challenging step is actually saving your document as a PDF now if you haven't done it before you may be confused as to how exactly to do it on a Mac instead simple you actually go from the print menu and you can actually save as a PDF from there from any document or any program that you're working on and it's actually very simple a lot of modern word processors can save as PDFs screenwriting programs and Google Docs can save automatically as a PDF as well from there we find that the easiest way to do it is just the document to yourself we just downloaded a free epub there are a lot out there this is David Copperfield by Charles Dickens a 3.9 megabyte file once it's downloaded you can click on it and it opens up a preview within email now at the top there's an open end button you just tap that and it actually shows you all of the apps that can read that will pick I books and it imports it really quickly and then it adds it to a library that's a parallel library to what's on your book collection on your iBooks app now the difference here is that you can't really change the font sizes and as you notice there's no pretty page turning you're going to have to deal with just side by side scrolling if you can bear it as far as chapters there really aren't that either if you press the chapter button at the top it actually brings up all the pages of the PDF which can get a little annoying if we're dealing with a tremendously large file it's not the greatest for large files if you're reading a novel in that regard although you can search the text within the PDF another nice thing about PDF files they'll retain all of their color and graphics as well so if you have big brochures or digital magazines those work great too now if you don't want to email it to yourself you can always simply do it from itunes the same way you would with epub or other files when you connect it within iTunes you can choose to add it within iTunes under the documents area you can add the files that you want so that's it we would love if you be able to take notes within the PDFs or be able to do some editing as well obviously that's not available with current technology but hopefully in the future that type of cloud document support will become easier and easier to use on devices like the iPad but for now it's a more diversity reader than you think and it's really easy to get files from your email if you're using PDFs I'm scotts diving this how to read PDF ebooks on your iPad hey I didn't say it was gonna be pretty like Scott says you probably won't want to read long PDF novels and I books but a little pamphlet might be okay okay folks get ready for the bad earlier Nicole Lee showed us a phone that exemplifies all that is good in the world of Android phones but while Samsung's 4G phone may be epic sony ericsson xperia x10 is decidedly less so take it away Kent hi I'm Kent Sherman senior editor here at cnet com today we take a first look at the sony ericsson xperia x10 now this is the x10 for AT&T service it does improve a couple of our biggest problems we had on the other original x10 one is that the virtual keyboard now works in landscape mode across all applications you also have a cheaper price you can try 149 with to your service rather than seven hundred dollars and the data services that will improve but that still doesn't mean we love it there are a couple things we had a problem with one is only once android 1.6 so with so many devices coming out now with 20 21 22 also there's that time scam application now that's similar to moto blur in the sense that it takes all of your email text messages multimedia facebook status updates tweets rolls them into one steady stream of information it sort of resembles a deck of cards I like the idea most of the time behind these applications but i think the timescape can be a little overwhelming it's just a lot of information for the bean thrown at you when originally came out it was one of the larger smartphones around it's great to have that amount of room on a touchscreen phone you can really get around and maneuver things that you want get through the menus you can type easily so really like that you do get three home screens you can populate in the normal Android fashion with folders with widgets with shortcuts anything you'd like it only supports 65536 colors so things look ok but they just could look a little better on the top of the phone there's a 3.5 millimeter headset jack the power control and a micro USB port on the side you'll see there's the volume rocker and we all set a camera shutter on the back there's a lens for the 8.1 megapixel camera and behind the battery cover is the micro SD slot we don't think that's the best location but as long as it's micro SD at not Sony's memory stick micro proprietary format we're going to let it slide in this point now the x10 does sony ericsson's user interface experience that's their customized interface for Android devices feel a little bit divided on these customized interfaces but overall certainly attractive certainly nice and just Sony Ericsson's effort to put a stamp on the phone features on the phone are pretty plentiful you have the 8.1 mega camera video you can get messaging you can get email if you want most work email so if we're outlook you'll have to go through a separate email applications I don't really love that idea but at least it's on the phone I think it is a good entry for sony ericsson's first android phone but with that 1.6 OS on there it's gonna look dated I'm Ken Sherman this is sony ericsson xperia x10 only android OS 1.6 and no ability to upgrade why bother and what a letdown this phone had tons of buzz when it was announced all right now it is time for this week's bottom line like most of you out there we like to spend at least a couple of hours a day watching cat videos on YouTube unlike the rest of you we're able to turn that into work presenting the top 5 cat videos of all time you know they tell me that YouTube gets fifteen hundred new cat videos posted every day so I'm glad to hear that because that means I'm not the only one who's crazy I'm Brian Cooley with the cnet top five so shameless I almost feel guilty about it almost it's top five cat videos we hunted down the top videos of cats on YouTube took out all the lazy compilations and any that looks remotely like cat torment because we don't roll that way and came up with these five that have monster traffic coming in at number five it's the ninja cat with 12.6 million views short simple and hilarious this is that video where the cat keeps getting closer to the camera without ever seeming to move brian Tong has the same disturbing habit number for Nora the piano playing cat 18 million views the London Times describes her music as somewhere between Philip Glass and free jazz yeah very free video of her playing has been studied in scholarly circles shown on just about every TV talk show and news website and her music is featured on a CD and like all great prodigy stories hers begins with humble roots a shelter rescue from new jersey number three kitten fight eighteen and a half million views this transcendent video is actually a set of important life lessons first it's about establishing limits on one's behavior through healthy conflict second it shows that no matter how engaged you are in said conflict that stops when someone pukes number two two talking cats 30 and a half million views okay these cats are talking to each other right just like i might do with you I mean look and then they groom each other which I don't want to do with you by the way before we get to number one it's not a mystery why there are so many cat videos out there cats are the most popular companion animal Scientific American says there are 600 million living among humans the Egyptians probably got all this started a relatively short 3600 years ago and if you're going to follow their lead I trust you'll adopt from a shelter okay I know you're sitting there in that cat sweater you knitted covered in fur itching to know the world's number one most popular cat video and this is it the mean kitty song with 36 million views you know this one was sparta the cat came out back in two thousand seven months now the music is disturbingly like men at work and I get a broad sense of unease watching that guy run around in his faux hawk and his camo pants but it can't mess with 36 million and that's one cute kitty I'm Brian Cooley I have seven caps and we'll see you next time for another top five the bottom line this week cooley loves his cats and that is not news actually so does the rest of the world apparently although as cute as they are I've always been partial to this little guy oh and by the way nice shirt coolly think that thing is gonna get its own YouTube channel and that's our show for this week join us next time when we'll be back with a brand new tech review until then there are tons of great videos available every day at Cena at tv.com I'll see you next time and thank you for watching