Gadgetory

this week on the cnet tech review motorola's droid 2 goes global google chrome Briggs websites to the web shopping apps for you to tap and the Samsung Nexus gets its s kicked 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 and offer some unique tech wisdom in the form of the bottom line let's start with the good the motorola droid was the phone that pretty much launched Android into the serious contender category but it had a few drawbacks and along came the droid 2 to fix some of those problems like the slowest processor in the awkward keyboard but droid 2 wasn't perfect either and it sure wasn't a world phone enter the droid 2 global is it the perfect little slider droid let's have a look hey everyone I'm Bonnie toss senior editor at cnet com and today I've got your first look at the motorola droid 2 global this is a lot like the droid 2 which was released in mid-august but as you might have guessed from the name this is a world phone the droid two uses dual mode technology so when you're using the phone in states it will operate on verizon's network like usual but when you travel overseas it will detect and automatically switch over to the GSM network so you can continue to make and receive calls using the same number Verizon ships the phone with a sim card but they will unlock it as long as you've been a customer for at least 60 days and are in good financial standing so you can swap it out for say a prepaid SIM you buy overseas there are also some other great features for business users the droid two runs android 2.2 and can be used as a mobile hotspot for up to five devices the smartphone also ships with a VPN client and the Quick Office suite so you can create view and edit Office documents and of course you can hook up your exchange account and sync your calendar and contacts there's some fun to be had to the music player is the stock Android player which isn't very sexy but it gets the job done the joy to features a slightly more powerful 1.2 gigahertz processor which kept the phone running smoothly my only concern is battery life with moderate use it lasted about a day but if you're using the multimedia features or web frequently the battery can dream pretty quickly as far as the design is on a lot like the droid 2 in front you get a 3.7 inch WVGA touch screen that's nice and sharp by sliding it bleh to the right you get access to the smartphone's full qwerty keyboard unlike the original droid motorola got rid of the d-pad so it's much more comfortable to hold and use the buttons also have a slight bump to them so they're easier to press it's not the best keyboard out there though I'd say the same sound epic 4g and t-mobile g2 both have better keyboards but if you're coming from the joy is definitely an improvement currently verizon's only other world phone running android is the motorola droid pro has more security features that might attract some enterprise users but i'd say the droid 2 global is the better device overall since you're getting a bigger sharper screen room your keyboard and a slightly faster processor motorola droid 2 global is available now in either black or white for 1 99 99 with a 2-year contract I'm Bonnie Tom this has been your first look at the motorola droid 2 global for Verizon Wireless alright so pretty good plus it comes in white white even the iPhone hasn't cracked that nut speaking of nuts that's what I thought Google was when I heard they were announcing a web app store that would turn websites into apps that run in the browser just like websites do yeah I was confused too but then Seth Rosenblatt got a look at some of these better than website web app and I have to admit some look pretty slick hi I'm sucker Rosenblatt frisina and today we're at the Google Chrome OS event where google debuted the Chrome OS for the first time unfortunately nobody was able to get a hold of a notebook to use we're gonna do that later this week but for right now we do have some really exciting Google Chrome Web Apps to show you the kind of like phone apps but in your browser let's go take a look this web app that we're looking at is called aviary aviary is already existing html5 based image editing suite on the web and even though they're already on the web they've gone ahead and created a Chrome web app for people to check out one of the nice things about it is that you don't have to sign in you don't have to log on like you do with the standard aviary app you just jump in and start editing your image right away and you see it has controls like rotate crop you can maintain proportions if you want choose preset sizes there quite a bit of neat things you can do here and it's all within the browser we're here at the Sports Illustrated web app where you can explore your favorite sports teams your favorite scores read sports illustrated's well-known articles and the killer feature i think is checking out their Chrome Web App photo gallery which you can see extremely large photos load very very fast and these things are just beautiful I mean look at the resolution on those that the colors pop yeah it's easily the best thing about the app and even if you're not into sports this is something you're gonna want to check out so we're here at the EA games in the Chrome Web Store and what's really neat about this is that not only are ea's games based in html5 but they've also got some flash based games that run incredibly quickly and as you can see here we have fancy pants well done in the app store that was flash I can't believe that was flashed I was incredibly fast even though flashes an older technology it's really really neat to see how these games can just blaze right through loading and gameplay and before you know it you've sucked away an entire hour playing these time wasters it's a lot of fun so that was a quick tour of the Chrome Web Store and some of the apps that you can load in your browser keep an eye out later this week for the Chrome OS first look video for Cena I'm stuff Rossum wasting an hour on games huh I wonder how long's death actually spent at that EA display now in case the masses of decorations the Jingle Bell type songs on the radio and the constant coupons and shopping deals haven't tipped you off yet it's holiday shopping season and here are the good that means good deals first our favorite desktop in a long time get it while it lasts and a darn cheap laptop after that hi I'm rich brown senior editor for cnet.com today we're going to take a look at the velocity micro vector holiday edition so this 999 PC is an editor's choice system and that's because it's one of the best deals we've ever seen for that 999 you get a blu-ray drive wireless networking an overclocked core i5 cpu a terabyte hard drive for gigs of ram and a fast nvidia graphics card basically the system has more features than we've ever seen in a PC for under thousand dollars it's faster than systems that cost two or three hundred dollars more and it comes in a fantastic-looking well-built case now velocity micro says they're going to offer the system until at least January first so you have a month to pick it up and we highly recommend that you do if you're at all interested in a a performance-oriented mainstream desktop if it's popular enough that may extend it into a winter edition but we obviously have no guarantees you can see there's a pretty clean front side here there's an SD card slot it's got a couple formats on it so let's a blu-ray drive up here on the side there's a couple USB ports as well as firewire and audio jacks now onto the back you can see all the connectivity ports back here and there's a lot of great options here thanks to the motherboard for data connections you get 6 usb2 ports a couple of USB 3 Jack's as well as firewire and East SATA inputs that array of ports lets you connect pretty much any external devices on the market right now for a vjax you get an optical digital audio output as well as standard 7.1 outs down to the video card you get a couple DVI jacks as well as a mini HDMI output this is no living room system but it's still nice to have the option as clean design is pretty typical of velocity of micros desktops all the cables are bound and tied out of the way makes upgrades or moving parts very easy you can see there's a lot of room for hard drive over here you've got one drive installed the terabyte drive as well as room for five additional drives you can plug in now here's one of the more impressive features about this PC there's a core i5 CPU underneath that fan right there now that's a quad-core CPU that ships at 2.8 gigs but velocity micro is overclocked head to 3.6 overclocking is impressive for a few reasons it gives you better performance that's pretty obvious but velocity micro also managed to do it with a stock fans that means you'll have to pay for liquid cooling or some other feature that would add to the price of this PC also we found that the overclocking is rock solid stable and we know that's because it had no problems on our stability test so you can see the nvidia geforce gtx 460 graphics card here that's a nice fast mid-range card it should play pretty much any game out there at decent resolution and image quality if you want more graphics performance so the system does have room for a second graphics card down here as well as a 600 watt power supply that should be all support a second mid-range card we probably wouldn't try to add two high-end cards to this system but two upper mid-range cards should be totally fine now there are two PCI slots on the motherboard but one of them is currently occupied by the wireless card but if you're going to add a second graphics card to the system you'd want to take the wireless card from where it is now and move it to the higher spot to make room so given all those features its build quality and it's impressive 999 price the system is easy to recommend as an editor's choice so I'm rich brown this is the velocity micro vector holidays i'm dan ackerman and we are here taking a look at the acer aspire AS 7741 z that mouthful actually kind of caught my eye because this is pretty much the least expensive desktop replacement 17 inch laptop that I have seen for the holiday season 2010 you can actually find this guy in retail exclusively at Walmart although there are there similar versions you may be able to find it other retailers and the reason why they can cram this big 17.3 inch screen into a system that's under five hundred dollars is because inside it's actually pretty much the same as a lot of these super inexpensive 14 and 15 this laptops are going to find usually but the 17 inch models get more powerful processors bigger hard drives more bells and whistles what they've really done here is take one of those super low-end midsize laptops that use the dual core intel pentium p 6100 cpu and just given it essentially a bigger screen and a separate number pad and dress it up in a body that's mostly plastic it's got some kind of plastic that looks like brushed metal right here the construction a little bit again on the plastic side the keyboard too much flex for me right there in the middle but it's not a terrible keyboard I do get an hdmi output for outputting high-definition videos to a big-screen TV if you feel like doing that the screen itself is actually got a 1600 x 900 resolution we were a little afraid when we first saw this based on the price that it was going to be a 1366 x 768 screen fortunately that is not the case though you know for under five hundred dollars in the 17 inch laptop I guess that's about as good a resolution as you're going to find it's got three gigs around again it's got that very basic intel dual core cpu which means it's good for web surfing and email and we were able to play you know high-definition video files back without a problem and watch some online streaming video you're not going to be able to do a heck of a lot more than that maybe set this up in the corner of like your Danner dorm room is like a little low power media center of course the key thing to remember 498 bucks if you want a big screen don't spend big money pretty much the only thing that we've seen this holiday season i'm dan ackerman and that is the H or aspire ASM 741 Z can you believe we've gotten to the point where a quad-core desktop is under a thousand bucks and a 17 inch laptop is under 500 these are crazy times people and while you ponder those deep thoughts let's take a little break shall we but don't wander off because we'll be right back with more 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 now let's get to the back now I'm one of those people who loves the holidays and holiday shopping but I know some of you think it's a chore like Arielle who would apparently rather have a daily appendectomy than shop for presents I also know he's not alone luckily there's an app or three for that if you're anything like me you hate Christmas shopping and you haven't even started yet I mariela nunez for cnet.com and i'm here to show you a few apps that can help you with your holiday shopping this season now better Christmas list is a good starting point you can list everyone you need to shop for divide them into categories set budgets and track spending there's also an archive feature so you can remember what you got people when you have to do this all over again next year now if you just don't know what to get someone gift Meister can help this app lets you search for gifts ideas according to gender age price range and lifestyle your results will pop up and voila no thinking necessary to find deals in your area check out yowza this app uses your iphones GPS to find coupons for stores in your current location no coupon printing necessary just show your phone directly to the cashier and yeah also keeps track of how much money you've saved and when you're out in the malls fighting the crowds amazoncom can help you get home as soon as possible so you can just order your gifts online use the scanning feature and amazon will search its database you can even order directly from your phone so hopefully this will ease your holiday insanity so you can focus on the more important things of this season eggnog I mariela nunez for cnet com happy holidays I mean I don't think Christmas shopping is the worst thing I do all here but i guess i would also like to get right to the eggnog okay moving on in the bad this next one might surprise you it's google's flagship new phone the nexus s see why it's down here in the doldrums hi I'm Kent charming senior editor here at cnet com today we take a first look at the samsung nexus s now this is one of the most anticipated android phones of the autumn season that's because it's the follow-up to the nexus one this phone offers largely the same concept it is have a different sales model you can buy it at bestbuy so you can actually go into the store it's also sold for t-mobile and it's sold without t-mobile contract and but like the previous phone both phones are unlocked so that's a great thing but there is a catch and of course there's always a catch it is compatible only with t-mobile's 3g network at least here in the united states you can use it on AT&T voice network so you can make a call and send message text messages but you can't use it on AT&T 3g another thing you need to be aware of it doesn't work with t-mobile's hspa+ network so they say it's 4g it's not really 4g but it's not compatible that really high speed network and that's really disappointing considering just an anticipated device it has almost everything else you'd want so we don't really understand why they didn't do that just described in the design you can see it as a simple candy bar phone it looks a lot like some of the get samsung galaxy s devices so it's very thin it's pretty light it is a super amoled display so it has about 16 million colors a great pixel resolution everything looks really good I'll compare it here with the nexus one to show you there's some is somewhat similar as far as the candy bar shape goes but certainly the Nexus X is a little slicker it just has a little more futuristic feel suddenly the nexus one feels a little weightier a couple things to note about the nexus s design it does have a contour display and so what that's supposed to be is the display is supposed to be curbed it actually is it's very slight you have to look at it very closely I'm not sure I see that at all I mean I don't notice the difference when I hold it against my head and I think if you really wanted to match it you'd have a pretty small head it has a front-facing vga camera in addition to the camera on the back and there's also a flash in the back also has an NFC chip now that's the technology the doesn't use much here in the United States yet but it would allow you to actually use your phone as a wallet and buy certain things and deduct money from a mobile account not a lot of merchants are really caught on to that technology so we'll see that development but it does have the capability also you'll be able to do VoIP calling and it is the first android phone with Gingerbread which is the latest version of the Android operating system now gingerbread brings a few things will shall show a couple to a couple of them to you does bring a different keyboard so the virtual keyboard that doesn't look that much different and also the cut and paste this a little easier to do now in Gingerbread you can actually select only the word that you're touching if you have a block of text so if you just want to select one thing that you can do also gingerbread gives you new little arrows that allow you to move the block of text to which you'd like to copy back and forth easier it's just a little better than having to move the line with your fingers you did before and now you get a little arrow so it's nice I really like it gingerbread also makes a wallpapers a little different and it offers had a few other features but that cut and copy paste is one of the biggest and one you'll probably notice right away one an important thing to point out with the Nexus S is it does not have a micro SD card slot now it does have 16 gigs of internal memory so that's a lot of space of course even if you want to use more than 16 gigs and there's probably some of you out there you won't have that option so that's disappointing one other thing that's missing is an hdmi out slot so we're hoping that this phone had a little more features than it does compared with the nexus one as I said a lot of the features are similar does add some new things of course gingerbreads a huge one but at the end of the day the phone isn't that much of an advancement over its predecessor so that's a bit disappointing but it does offer that unfiltered access right to Google applications you'd expect so if you're a real hard core android fan probably a decent phone for you as I said you can't get it unlocked you can't get it for 529 and that's without any kind of contract or you can get it 199 with a tmobile to your contract but the phone is that phone is also unlocked as well so that's a good thing I'm Ken German is the Samsung Nexus S man I gotta say that phone is a bit of a letdown I mean I think the front facing camera is a must-have but there are so many phones coming out early next year I just don't think this phone is a must-have which is a bummer because I really wanted to love it ok now the Nexus S is a little bit of a letdown but that is nothing compared to say that may long m150 tablet which is hilariously bad so let's just win Donald up and watch him go hey I'm Donald bell today we're taking a first look at the mail on m150 android tablet also known as the $99 walgreens tablet in full disclosure we paid closer to 130 dollars but really this thing is a bad value no matter what you pay for it it may look like an offspring of the iPad and the galaxy tab but this unfortunate thing is a bait and switch in every possible way the button on the front looks like a home button but it's actually a back key the app market on the menu takes you to a clearinghouse of free apps that no one wants the clunky resistive display on the front is covered with a worked plastic and if you want to get anything done you're best off using the included stylus all of the icons for the stock android 1.6 apps have been given a pointless makeover just two ugh things up and if you want to sync this back to your computer good luck the port on the bottom here that looks like a dock connector is actually there to work with this included adapter which adds two USB ports and a feature we've all been asking for an Ethernet port that's right you get an Ethernet port but you don't actually have a way to USB sync this over to your computer and transfer content instead the best you get is a microSD card slot that allows you to add media also on the bottom you'll find speakers a headphone jack and the power adapter socket that works with the included wall wart just don't lose it because we'll be recharging this every few hours even if you're just doing some light web browsing the bottom line is that this thing's more trouble than it's worth and it's also a case study and how these kinds of budget android tablets can be disappointing if you're shopping around there's a hundred-dollar to two hundred dollar price range a newer use ipod touch is going to deliver an infinitely better experience though with a smaller screen so there you go that's the walgreens tablet demystified if you spot one in the wild or something like it I would steer clear no matter how good a bargain see she was calm I'm Donald Bell man I don't even know what's my favorite part there the disdain with which he pronounces stylus or his shock and awe over the Ethernet port well now you know you get what you pay for and with that let's get to the bottom line shall we the electric car has arrived well the Nissan Leaf SLE has arrived in our garage anyway and Brian coolies got to look at whether this little electric is the one to go mainstream never mind the Chevy Volt for a minute the nissan leaf looks like it has the best chance of being the next prius let's jump into a freshly minted 2011's l ii and check the very extensive tech avoid of any General Motors baggage or powertrain definitions that dog the Volt the leaf is in arguably electric and it hails from a respected brand of modern and often efficient cars being Japanese just a bit quirky and priced right as long as the feds stay in the tax credit game don't hurt either but is all that enough to overcome the big one range anxiety now the most innovative part of the leaf of course is what moves it around here's the motor which looks a lot like an engine I wonder if they styled it that way just so it wouldn't look so odd because that has like the look of a of a cam cover but there's no cam so I'm not sure what's under there but anyway this is an electric motor 80 kilowatt is the power it's about 107 horsepower 207 foot-pounds of torque notice lots of torque compared to the horsepower that's an electric thing that goes out to a one speed transmission it's really just a reduction gear there is no gear changing no CVT nothing like that now the interesting part this whole powertrain delivers some freshly published EPA numbers I just happened to have right here 99 mpg equivalent that's comparing the electric power to the hundred and 15,000 btus of energy in a gallon of gas it's a little convoluted for the average consumer but it gives you some idea how stunningly efficient this car is that said look at the range not the 100 Nissan said 73 miles is the real range the EPA estimates and again that will vary depending on your terrain time of year use of accessories never seen these numbers before zero greenhouse gases that's rather clean and check out the annual energy costs normally a cars 1500 to 2500 dollars a year to run average number of miles driven look at this guy 561 that's a very low cost to drive this car the average miles through the course of a year but where does that juice come from down here the other hood this little rather oddly placed door is where the charging ports are the orange ones the one you're going to use most typically that's where a 220 can ngozi with a special cable they've got this included with the car and that'll get you a charge from flat in seven or eight hours this is the sweet spot you can also plug into 110 but pack a lunch because that's going to be 14 to 16 hours to charge this guy 110 is really more for trickle and then if you go for an optional charging adapter built into your premises you can use this guy the really cool one the 480 that'll charge this car in about a half an hour okay inside the leaf you're not gonna forget you're in a leaf no one's gonna say Mel tomorrow Sentra it's a completely different cabin than any other nissan you've got the eyebrow design and then the main LCD screen notice not a single wagging needle in the entire IP no gauges all displays let's take him in order up on the eyebrow there you've got some energy information your speed time temperature a lot of the basics now down here in the main display things get really interesting on the left is your battery temperature the nearest thing to an engine temperature across the top that row of rings that's not an Audi logo gone nuts that is your region or power dispersal thing so it's telling you if you're recapturing energy to the left of that break where the little blue circular arrows are or how much power you're discharging the farther you go to the right just a stylized way of showing what could be done with a needle and then on the rights the one you're going to be looking at all the time with nervousness and a roiling gut that is your level of charge and next to that is your projected remaining miles now that's a guesstimate I find that doesn't always seem to agree with the battery charge level but I'm not the expert the computer in the car is this little blue button here and the one on the steering wheel their unique to the leaf the one over here on the right takes you to the leaf master menu all kinds of good stuff here driving range tells you like you might imagine how far you can go and where there are charging stations within that range of how far you can go there's also a shortcut to that exact menu right here on the wheel it's the old button when you just looked up and realized I got about a bar or two left and I got a long way to go you hit this guy and it'll take you to the nearer and your sack bomber arranged map now the last thing on leaf 101 is how to drive this thing you've got the usual pedals down on the floor this is a steering wheel you've seen one of these before that's not standard that's the goofy of shifter ever made so what you do with that guy according to this map right here is you slide it over kind of pre us like and up for reverse which seems a little bit odd wouldn't you slide it over and back for reverse and then to go and drive you do yes exactly the wrong thing you pull it over and go back to go forward either swap those house they drove the leaf which I did rather little I started to really feel the pain of real-world range anxiety as opposed to I'm a reviewer I can't wait to drive it except driven the leaf several times so it wasn't like I had to experience it for the first time on this visit with it I didn't drive it much because already been there done that and everything I had to do over the last few days I had range issues so I started to feel like a normal non reviewer consumer who's gonna say enough can't hit the leaf there yeah shouldn't take the leaf there cuz I don't want to worry about being on the fringe of range a 2011 leaf SLE will run you about 33 grand just like we saw it now deduct a federal tax credit that is currently maxing out at 7,500 bucks but that's not a rebate or cash it's a credit to reduce the amount of tax you owe the feds in the year you buy the leaf if you normally get a rebate at tax time then there's no tax bill to apply the credit to and you just pay for the leaf yourself and that tax credit cannot take you into a refund in an of itself so you want to buy this car in coordination with your accountant and not take tax advice from me the bottom line this week it's not easy being green saving the earth isn't always convenient sometimes it's downright terrifying and funny looking but hey it's tough being an early adopter you can see the rest of that leaf video over at cnet TV and that's it for this episode but come back next week when we'll have a brand new edition of the CNN tech review until then there are tons of great videos available every day at cnet TV com see you next time and thank you for watching