Gadgetory

this week on the cnet tech review it's all Android all the time almost we got a taste of Ice Cream Sandwich running on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus two new tablets from amazon and barnes and noble and how to make google music work for you plus brian coolies favorite cars of the year so far it's all coming up right now hi everyone I'm Hollywood and welcome to the Cena 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 text plus we offer our own unique tech wisdom in the form of the bottom line let's start things off with the good smartphone and android fans have been waiting a long time for the arrival of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus although the phone itself isn't as exciting as the OS running it kent german has our first look at this hotly anticipated handset hi I'm Kent chairman section editor here at cnet com today we take a first look at the Samsung Galaxy Nexus now if you're an Android fan and even if you're not you probably know about this phone this is an unlocked gsm version we're using it on tmobile this is the first phone to offer ice cream sandwich which is Google's newest operating system or the newest update of its operating system now Ice Cream Sandwich has a whole lot of stuff in it I'm going to concentrate on the phone for this video though when you take away Ice Cream Sandwich you're left with actually a pretty standard Android device it does look like the Nexus S and a lot of the galaxy s phones before it so you'll notice it has that same really thin profile the dark color it has that contour design which is designed to mimic the shape of your head is pretty big as a 4.6 five Super AMOLED display the funny thing though it's because you have this bar down here at the bottom that has icons you can rotate in and out not all of the screen is usable it's plenty big for a smartphone not so big for ice cream sandwich was Jessica will talk about but this display is bright its colorful its vivid you get five home screens you can populate them as you like you can cycle do a couple pages here between widgets and apps you go over here you'll see a big tray of widgets and then you can drag these to the home screens down at the bottom you have three controls there's back there's one that will take you home and there's a button that will open the screen so you've seen recently on the back you have a little bit of a textured material it is a nice change over the slick exterior here I have to say it like a lot of Samsung Galaxy devices and like the Nexus S it does feel very light in the hand it almost feels a little too fragile but it just feels just a little wispy and I really would be afraid of dropping it even once on a hard surface just feel that would break and gosh sometimes they even get the feeling like it could snap in half so that something Samsung has always done just their devices don't seem that rugged or sturdy internal features that don't have to do with ice cream sandwich you'll find everything there that you're used to you'll get messaging you'll get organizer apps you'll get access to the android market all the google apps there's a 5-megapixel camera it does have a camcorder everything you like about Google will be on this phone of course since it is a Nexus device it is a pure Google experience so there's no sort of manufacturer overlay or any kind of carrier overlay so you have to do with HTC sense or motoblur or anything like that I do like the design of this phone I like the features but of course just remember when you take out ice cream sandwich you don't have a whole lot their ice cream sandwich is really what this phone is about i'm kent german and this is the Samsung Galaxy Nexus gosh Kent please do be careful with that phone it's the only one we've gotten around here I guess he was able to keep from breaking it long enough for Jessica dole court to get her hands on it as Kent promised here's her first look at the latest version of Android Ice Cream Sandwich it is finally here at the next version of android which is better known as ice cream sandwich and guess what it is enormous I'm Jessica doll court for cnet and i'm going to show you around ok well i can't show you everything because we don't have half an hour but i will hit the high points first of all there's the interface google has pretty much reworked almost every single element making it look really fresh but also familiar since one of the goals was creating one single operating system for tablets and smartphones there are a lot of elements from the tablet focused honeycomb OS in here like the new on-screen navigational controls Ice Cream Sandwich loses the search and menu navigation buttons but it gains a button to see mo recent programs just like in honeycomb search is definitely more prominent as well and Google has tried to do away with needing a menu you can launch voice controls from the microphone button in the search bar menu buttons by the way now look like a three dot colon folders are another new feature as in iOS you just drag and drop icons on top of one another to create a new folder there are five icons on the bottom of the home screens and you can customize these two just by dragging and dropping them off and on the notifications tray looks really beautiful now and you can swipe away notifications that you no longer want to see that's sort of a new hidden feature the app tray looks pretty similar as before but now it also holds widgets that you can drag and drop to the home screens and even resize I personally think that the widgets portion looks a little bit cluttered and the grid indicators are really confusing if you don't know what they're there for I do like the android market button that you can access from any screen within the app tray google has also completely reworked how it handles contacts the entire look and feel of the app is new but so is how you use it the key is to tap your buddies contact image to call text or email when you dial the phone goes into full screen mode which looks cool but it doesn't really fit into the aesthetic of the home screens and when you get an incoming call you can drag the ring over one of three icons to either answer hang up or send a text gmail get some really neat enhancements as well there are new graphics of course but also some neat touches in a really clean and logical interface for example when you start typing a name Google will auto suggest the address and include your friends photos as well the menu bar makes it really easy to add attachments and get to settings and there are some really great spell check features too plus you can simply drag and drop selected text now not just press buttons to cut and paste the camera app also got a makeover and the biggest change is that panorama mode is now front and center I'm not really sure that this is necessary but it is a nice feature to have regardless it worked smoothly in my tests to it but even better in my opinion is the gallery which gets new icons for easily sharing photos and it gets a full suite of editing and those can reduce red I sharpen straighten crop correct color and also add effects the video tool lets you do time-lapse now which is very cool and it also adds some silly effects which are fun but also frankly very creepy there are also some wacky and sort of Impractical backgrounds that you can superimpose into your videos for an extra life the one thing i don't like about the gallery is how cluttered and visually busy the tiles are when you're looking at your pictures or screenshots and i wish there was more space between them because my eyes are frankly just going a little bit nuts trying to find the photo i want amidst all of this now i know that what you really want to know about is unlocking the phone with your face google admits that face unlock isn't the most secure especially because a doppelganger of yours or a photo of you will also unlock the phone but it is cool to see facial recognition implemented in android but seriously it's more of a conversational piece than anything else i'm sure that you also want to know about Android Beam which uses a radiofrequency standard called NFC to pass information from one compatible phone to another since all i have is the one phone right here i have not been able to test this feature at the moment so overall ice cream sandwich is a really huge update that touches almost all of the attributes of android it's powerful and yes it succeeds in many many areas however there is a little bit of discord when it comes to some of the graphical themes that I think can be a little confusing and honestly it shouldn't be there as part of a polished and mature operating system I also think that ice cream sandwich will look even better on a tablet than it does on a phone so Google has a little bit of work to do but this really is a serious stuff up into Android adulthood I'm jessica's all court you can read the full review of ice cream sandwich and the Galaxy Nexus smartphone on cnet and clock calm Ice Cream Sandwich seems to be following the general Android trend pretty amazing but not all the way baked still pretty good start in other Android news the last couple of weeks have seen the arrival of two new full-fledged tablets from two major ebook retailers first up Scott Stein is here to show off the latest from barnes & noble the simply named nuke tablet hi I'm Scott Stein senior editor at cnet com and last year the nook color changed the tablet landscape for a lot of people by introducing an affordable two hundred fifty dollar 7-inch color tablet that actually was rootable and was an Android device and could compete with the ipad at a price that nobody had really thought about before well this holiday it's up the ante because the amazon has the kindle fire which is a 7-inch android tablet to compete with the nook color Barnes and Noble has fired back by introducing the Nook Tablet now this is sort of the iphone 4s iphone 4 of nook products because from the outside this looks a lot like the new color now there are some definite design changes in terms of the finish and the feel almost like a teflon type soft touch on the sides here but it really does look like a new color but the innards are changed it's a dual-core processor there's one gig of ram and this has an improved screen there's an IPS display made by LG now these storage options are also improved their 16 gigabytes of on-board storage with a microSD card slot that's upgradeable to an extra thirty two gigabytes of storage that's a big deal because the Kindle Fire has only 8 gigabytes of on-board storage of which only about 6 gigabytes are accessible so there's a big leap in terms of what you can store on barnes and noble's nook tablet but what the new clacks is a cloud ecosystem that's comparable to what amazon gives you amazon has a cloud music player they have video on demand that's really great and a great alternative to itunes and of course they have their book assortment and there are a wide variety of color magazines that also allows subscriptions if you already have the print versions there's also a large app library but it's not the same this is an Android Gingerbread tablet but it doesn't taste like gingerbread because it's developed using its own clothes system that has a curated selection of apps you will get some of the big hits like Pandora Netflix Hulu Plus angry birds but you're not gonna be able to get that large variety unless you start playing rooty tooty fresh and fruity and root your tablet then you could play around with some other features for everybody else you're going to get a closed environment still it's going to provide most of those big basic features and a nice web browsing experience but maybe not quite as refined as what we saw on the kindle fire now what it really boils down to is how much of a side loader are you and when I mean side load I mean loading in media from your computer as opposed to streaming it on your device if you're that type of person and that ranges from mp3 files to with video probably stuff that's not drm then the Nook Tablet is going to be that type of device for you in fact they're counting on you to make it that type of device with that type of storage doesn't mean you can't use cloud video of a sort in fact Netflix and Hulu Plus look fantastic on this screen in fact it looked a little bit better than it did on the kindle fire and the IPS display has really nice viewing angles nice sharp colors and a good definition so it seems like a video experience that really holds up in streaming to what you would get on an iPad it feels not that dense but but definitely holdable in one hand and something maybe you could take out on the town with you take on a trip a little bit easier than an iPad but the limitations of that display especially with web browsing don't quite feel the same as what you get on a large 10 inch screen like an iPad but they're different devices there's a two hundred fifty dollar device that is half the price of what you pay for an iPad and gives a lot of people a really nice feature set of what they look for and what they think of as a tablet now if you're shopping for the holidays and looking at the nook tablet versus the kindle fire which a lot of people are that extra fifty dollars is getting you twice a storage an expandable card slot arguably some nicer looking screen and performance details may be a little bit zippier but you're giving up those cloud services and if you're using a kindle already well there are a lot of books and hey if you're a obviously or if a prime subscriber and you're paying seventy nine dollars a year there's a lot of free content that Amazon is angling to you as an incentive to go with the kindle fire now while the new color is still out there it's 50 bucks less and and has a few improvements over last year's model if you're buying a new product this year spend the extra fifty dollars go with the nook tablet and be glad for its improved specs and storage I'm Scott Stein and that's a look at the Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet biggest selling point there the extra storage especially if you're a big downloader and we'll have more on the second big tablet of the week the amazon kindle fire later in the show so you can compare now even though google music isn't totally android centric it's really android users who could potentially benefit most from the new service google music officially came out of beta this week and Donald Bell has a first look hey I'm Donal Bell and this is a first look at google music this is Google's music store and cloud locker and a real competitor to itunes and amazon on the web you can access the Google Music Store by heading to market android com / music and here you're going to find a curated selection of songs and albums along with top songs and a free song of the day when you dive into an album page you'll see album info and pricing along with track listings that offer 90 second song previews you'll also notice a section here for similar artists down here on the left for discovering more music after purchasing a song or an album the music is instantly transferred over to your online google music library and a high-quality 320kbps mp3 format you also have a share button here that will show your music purchase to your friends on Google's social network and allow them to listen to the full track once for free now unlike most music stores your purchase music doesn't automatically download to your computer if you really want the file you'll need to find it on Google's music library and select the save to computer option this option is only here for music you purchase from google you can upload up to 20,000 additional songs from your own computer and stream them at no charge but you can't download them back down like you can with purchase tracks the real payoff here is for android phone users the music store is also accessible through the mobile version of market and your purchased and uploaded music tracks can be streamed back down to you using Google's music app now it's worth noting that the Google Music app is a different app than what probably came installed on your phone it's a free download but if it doesn't have this black headphone icon you've got the wrong app iphone ipad and ipod touch users can also access and stream their music collection by heading to music google com on their Safari web browser so there you go that's Google Music in a nutshell it's a clean-looking well-priced music store with some smart cloud integration and convenient features for android smartphone users prasina com I'm tompa i gotta say i was hoping for a little bit more like slightly better integration with the existing Android music app just sayin but Android ease will be happy I'm sure and with that let's take a break we'll be back with more Android atlas I mean cnet 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 in the good Brian Cooley was in Los Angeles this week for the 2011 LA Auto Show adding to the amazing tally of cars that he sees and drives every year now they can't all be winners in his eyes but in this week's top five Brian's counting down the cars that he might just consider spending his own money on I check out a lot of new cars every year about a hundred that we shoot here it's seen that almost that many of the world's big auto shows but if you think I look at everyone and want it you're very wrong I'm Brian Cooley with the top 50 really the only five cars that I shot in 2011 that I ever looked into buying for myself number five the ford transit connect yeah i see you there looking at me like i have two heads but i love the idea of a stand-up height van that isn't some huge ponderous pain in the ass to drive and keep fueled it's based on the Ford Focus so things begin economical and stay that way it has basically no tech which is fine by me in something like this I've got a smartphone a window mount and an aux cable we're good let's go haul some stuff number four was another ford the mustang GT i would have ranked it higher if it was the model with the v6 which i think is the sweet spot of the mustang line since that's a powertrain you can actually drive it seven-tenths in the real world unlike this affordable v8 monster which has a superb new five liter engine one of the best interiors in the US car business great lines I think and Ford SYNC though the interface on that needs a refresh number three the Kia Optima this is actually my go-to car right now all this year really when anyone asks me what car they should buy it has handsome lines courtesy of X Audi designer Peter Schreyer an interior no car in this price class has a right to offer plentiful and usable center stack technology and real responsive drivability which is often overlooked in favour of performance stuff like horsepower and zero to sixty stuff that you don't really care about number two the fiat 500c now I'm a Fiat partisan from way back as you may know but that notwithstanding I love how the Fiat leads that brands return to the US with stylish looks a great modern version of the old retro ragtop adequate tech and fun if underpowered drivability and all that under grand for a convertible step up to the more powerful a Barth version will be testing soon and this cars story comes full circle before I get you to the number one car that I thought about for me this year here are the three cars that i recall hating without having to even look back at my notes the MINI Countryman it costs too much the stick is tired and the one they sent us died and had to be hauled away the smart fortwo I had such high hopes for this little piece of crap but Mercedes is going to relaunch it in 2012 and I think it has about one more chance to come up a winner and the Volkswagen Eos first car we ever rebadged enough said okay the number one car I configured and penciled out for myself in a long lovely what if was the 911 carrera GTS believe me I'm as allergic to the whole 911 cliche as I bet you are and they even sent us a yellow one yeah but on the road the GTS reminds you why this car is a classic it's maybe the only car this year maybe in the history of seen that car tech that I can say feels like an extension of the driver and keep a straight face it's light it's responsive it's built like an ingot of Steel but it's got serious power right now power but it's totally livable day to day lots of tech yes but they still trail BMW and Audi in that respect but that isn't the point no car I drove all of 2011 succeeded so well at delivering what it's set out to do okay you can find all my car videos including those of cars you love and I don't at cnet TV com just pull down car tech under the tech shows tab and find more top 5s like this at top 5 cnet com I'm Brian Cooley thanks for watching of course don't count on Cooley to actually add any of those cars to his fleet anytime soon as regular car tech fans know he's still pretty partial to that ford country squire me though I definitely would not mind seeing that Porsche in my driveway with a big red bow on it this Christmas I love those big red bows but I can't say the same thing about the TV that's coming up next in the back it may feel like we're picking on TV manufacturers in this section lately but let's face it if you can't put out a TV with decent picture quality what else is it good for in the example we're about to see it seems as if Vizio has forgotten the main reason that people buy a TV in the first place David Katz Meyer here I'm sitting next to the vizio e3 d0v x-series this is the 42 inch member of the series there's also a 32 and a 47 inch here this is the least expensive 3d TV on the market Vizio actually includes two pairs of 3d glasses here which makes the TV a better overall value than the cheaper 3d plasmas that are available get to that and a little bit but first let's take a look at the other features on this TV and it's styling styling is not really a great point it has this sort of dimple here in the middle underneath the screen it kind of interrupts the speaker grill all together a pretty chunky look the stand it doesn't swivel on the flip side design wise we really did like this flipper remote Vizio does include a full qwerty keyboard on the back side of its remote which is really cool for navigating apps and typing and passwords doing searches stuff like that so it's a real help we wish more manufacturers would include it because obviously Stevie's pretty darn inexpensive in to throw in that remote didn't add all that much of the price the downside compared to the flip are found on some Samsung TVs is that this TV doesn't have bluetooth so you have to actually keep the remote aimed at the TV while you're typing so unless you have something interrupting line-of-sight that shouldn't be too difficult TV also includes built-in Wi-Fi to access all those internet features so we really like that you have to run a wire to this TV and the Wi-Fi worked very well in our testing course speaking of internet it does include the videos via applications platform which includes Netflix Amazon video and demand food and all the major services there's also Pandora there isn't YouTube however but that's not really a big deal in our opinion we did like the rhapsody app which course only works for rhapsody subscribers leg to stream unlimited music there's also a few other apps the interface however wasn't all that great it includes this sort of strip along the bottom here you can only see four at once so you got to scroll a lot if you have a lot of apps also application discovery is I'm not quite as advanced as a lot of the other TVs on the market the connectivity on the Vizio is pretty darn good around back to find two HDMI there's also a third on the side we also like that the inputs are labeled good better best for people who are not too familiar with input quality so basically just plug in HDMI you'll be fine so as you can see the video is very well featured but I'm downside it's picture quality is not all that great and 2d biggest flaw is relatively light black levels which wash out the darker parts of the picture and make the entire image look a little bit flatter and with less pop that some of the competing entry-level TVs video processing was also a weak point the Vizio doesn't handle 1080p 24 source as well as some of the other TVs we've tested on the flipside its color accuracy was very good and we did appreciate the matte screen which rejected ambient light well finally it does have better uniformly than many of the other LED TVs we've seen 3d picture quality on the Vizio is a mixed bag it does have passive 3d which is brighter and has less crosstalk then active 3d in general and that's very good on the downside there is some visible line structure and text and some flat fields we also saw the image was a little bit softer than some of the other TVs on the market but again 3d was pretty darn sharp all told that's a quick look at the Vizio e3 d0v x-series and i'm david katz meijer I know 3ds the hot new trend in TVs but if 99% of the stuff we're watching is still 2d kind of gotta nail that come on guys all right let's keep it moving right on down to the bottom line the much-awaited kindle fire made its debut this week facing stiff competition from the nook tablet and of course the iPad so does it deliver let's find out hey i'm donald l and this is a first look at the kindle fire Amazon's a hundred ninety nine dollar 7-inch tablet what a hundred ninety-nine bucks buys you here is a dead simple way to access digital entertainment at the top here you'll see categories for newsstand books music videos Doc's apps and the web browser with the exception of docs in the browser each of those categories are going to toggle between the collection and Amazon's digital store for that content another interesting feature is that when you're looking at your collection you get another toggle here between what's stored on the device and the stuff you bought in the past that's backed up to the cloud this is really dramatic in the music view since Amazon allows you to upload your entire music library to their cloud where you can stream your music or select songs or albums download all the navigation is done on the screen and when you're in a nap or a menu you'll see controls on the bottom settings are accessible at the top of the screen and on the main menu beneath the categories you get a nice big view of your recently used apps and files along with a shelf of your favorite stuff these can be your favorite apps books albums or websites and you add them by just holding down the icon up here beyond entertainment you also get an email client in a web browser email is fairly straightforward and get some help from Amazon's on custom keyboard which I personally liked the web browser is typical for a 7-inch android tablet page load time is Swift I'm glad to see that there's a setting here that will force the browser into loading standard web pages instead of those smaller mobile versions made for cell phones still in general I'm not a big fan of browsing the web on a 7-inch screen it's better than a smartphone but it still leaves you doing more zooming and scrolling than you would on a larger tablet like the ipad as for what's missing well there's no GPS no Maps no bluetooth no cameras no microphone no video output no calendar no card slot for extra memory and I'm probably forgetting a few things but let's go back to my original point it's a hundred and ninety-nine dollars at that price I think it's a slam dunk you're getting more entertainment options than on barnes & noble's nook tablet more screen than Apple's 199 dollar ipod touch and an ease of use you're really not going to find at any price would I rather have an iPad absolutely but for three hundred dollars less the kindle fire is a good enough option for those who are mostly looking for entertainment or a workable way to email and browse the web from the couch so that's the kindle fire it's all the fun stuff on a simple tablet for the great price cnet com I'm tambo the bottom line this week 199 dollars sold that price is just about irresistible for all that little tablet can do especially if you're already a fan of everything amazon it is a horse race between the fire and the nook but i think that 50 bucks could be all the difference you need of course if you don't need all those tablet features and you just want a solid ereader the newest version of the Kindle Touch is out now 24 just ninety nine dollars so many choices and that's going to do it for this week's show but come back next time for an all-new cnet tech review until then there are tons of great videos available every day as seen on TV com see you next time and thank you for watching you