Gadgetory

this week on the scene a tech review whether puts a damper on the Verizon iPhone launch in New York City HP gets behind webOS in a big way and in a little one double your pleasure with Sprint's Kyocera echo and dude don't get this Dell it's all coming up right now hi everyone i'm brian tong and welcome to the scene that 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 February 10 2011 a date that will go down in the history books I'm speaking of course of the day the Verizon iPhone went on sale to the public for the first time Maggie Reardon was at the Apple store in Manhattan but she didn't have a lot of company I'm Maggie burden with cnet.com and I'm here at the Apple store on Fifth Avenue where Verizon and Apple are about to kick off the Verizon iPhone the crowds here are not quite what they are for a normal iPhone launch its 6:50 here in Manhattan and there are seven people in line the phone actually goes on sale at 7 o'clock this morning and the temperatures are in the teens snow was on the grounds and people are staying home so tell me what brought you out on this bitter cold day in Manhattan to to buy the iPhone I got to go to work and aside from that I'll be traveling later today so I just wanted to get it out of the way you know this morning so I thought there was gonna be a really really big line I was surprised I got here around 6:30 and I was fourth in line so I was previously on t-mobile and I guess now I'm on Verizon customers so it's actually my first time waiting online for anything and probably won't do it again it's a little silly but it's about 7:30 here now about a half hour after the doors have opened it took only seconds for the line to dwindle down to nothing clearly Apple was expecting a bigger turnout the story inside is just a sea of blue shirts with Apple employees willing to help people but there aren't a lot of customers to help I guess we finally have our answer to the question what will keep people from an iPhone launch 20 degree weather in Manhattan I'm Maggie written with CNET news so now that the wait is over have you decided if you want to buy one or not last week Brian coolly told us his top five reasons why you shouldn't buy a Verizon iPhone and frankly he'd made some good arguments before she left on vacation Hollywood took some time to outline the top five reasons why you should get one let's hear her side of the story hi I'm Hollywood in for Brian Cooley with a scene at top 5 the top 5 reasons to buy ever eyes an iPhone see recently Brian Cooley brought you top 5 reasons not to buy the Verizon iPhone limited global roaming no simultaneous voice and data no 4G whatever hater if the presale numbers are any indication at all the Verizon iPhone is going to be a monster hit but if you're still on the fence here are five reasons you might want to take the leap coming in at number five no death-grip because of a slight redesign with the iPhone 4 those issues about holding the phone wrong and losing reception are now solved and you won't need an ugly rubber bumper to use with this model bonus at number four the Verizon iPhone can act as a mobile hotspot providing wireless Internet access to up to five devices yes it costs an additional 20 bucks a month but that's a lot less than a Verizon MiFi costs AT&T is rumoured to be working on offering the mobile hotspot capability but right now they cannot match that feature and it is super handy especially if it's paired with number three Verizon's unlimited data plan for 30 bucks a month now granted verizon says the plan will only be available for a limited time but if you're a serious pandora streamer a podcast downloader or a Netflix watcher on your phone and you want to do the mobile tethering the unlimited data is a huge plus for as long as it lasts moving on to number two duh better voice calling in his top five reasons not to buy coolly noted that with CDMA technology you can't do voice and data at the same time that's true but on the flipside when the phone only does voice you're a lot less likely to get dropped calls because the voice isn't being crowded out by the data that's right I'm saying they can hear you now and finally the number one reason to buy a Verizon iPhone for God's sake people you've been waiting for years already it's like Santa came and it's Christmas morning finally finally you can open the present and have your very own iPhone on Verizon who cares if there's gonna be another version in six months go ahead scratch that itch alright that's it for this week everyone for more top 5 videos head on over it's a top 5 dusty Netcom I'm Hollywood and thank you for watching there you have it guys the pros and cons in the Verizon iPhone debate and let's be honest I'm Ali's not getting an iPhone anytime ever now where do I fall in this fight you'll just have to tune in the Apple byte to find out and you can check it out at Cena tv.com it wasn't all iPhone news this week in fact HP put all its weight behind the webOS platform at an event in San Francisco on Wednesday among HP's many announcements was the unveiling of two new Web OS smartphones here's HP's senior VP and GM Jon Rubenstein with the details then stick around for Eric Franklin as he wraps his mammoth hands around the tiny HP beer this is the HP veer the veer has all the features even the most sophisticated smartphone offers coupled with the unique functionality of webOS so it's everything a smartphone should be in one powerfully small design in fact it's just about the size of a credit card me I never leave home without it it's slide-out QWERTY keyboard is one of the best most usable keyboards we've ever made it has a vivid 2.6 inch capacitive touchscreen and a gesture area for navigation with the veer you get a high performance web browser it gives you access to the full web including support for Adobe Flash and it comes with a built-in GPS that integrates with location-aware apps to help you find your way or find cool things to do the veer has full multimedia capability including a 5 megapixel camera and it comes with the USB port and audio jack using a really really cool magnetic connector vier supports HSPA+ 800 2011 B&G and bluetooth 2.1 with EDR it's got 8 gigabytes of storage and the same memory as the pre 2 so it's got more than enough horsepower to play even the most intense 3d games the veer is one of the first smartphones to use Qualcomm second-generation Snapdragon 7230 processor and it comes with all the sensors you'd expect from this class of phone its performance stands up to any device of the market and with HP's mobile hotspot the the veer can act as a mobile Wi-Fi router for up to five Wi-Fi enabled devices never before has a smart phone done so much and felt so little all of us and especially our CEO can't wait to get HP's first web of webOS device into users hands as soon as possible the new veer will be available in early spring the veer is just one way we at HP are thinking beyond as I said before customers want a device that works well for them and a lot of people out there spend their time on the go while they're on the clock they want a smart phone that makes it easy to do email view documents and have video calls with colleagues but they also want to browse the web watch YouTube videos and play Assassin's Creed all in the same device and they wonder why is that so much to ask well it's not too much to ask of HP today we're introducing a smart phone for professionals who want a powerful productivity without giving up their personal passions meet the pre three yeah come on finally a phone you can use for business that you don't want to leave at work the pre three is a full-size fully equipped office on the go it's a thin portrait slider with the largest QWERTY keyboard we've put on any web OS phone to date so it easily handles business class email it has a gesture area for navigation in a gorgeous three point six inch WVGA display it's okay okay that's two and a half times the resolution of the pre so it really accentuates the webOS experience for both professional and personal use pre three has full multimedia capability including a five megapixel camera that shoots HD video with video stabilization and a forward facing camera for video calling pre three comes in two versions HSPA+ and EVDO Rev a world phone supports a 2 mm B G and N and as well as Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR it comes with 8 gigabytes or 16 gigabytes of storage and again the same memory we have in the pre 2 so running even the most demanding applications is a breeze the pre 3 includes the standard suite of sensors you'd expect in a phone with this level of performance including a compass its Qualcomm processor runs at a stunning 1.4 gigahertz it's got great performance all this and more makes the pre 3 a professional workhorse designed for today's increasingly increasingly blended mix of work and personal life hey guys is there at Franklin C net we're here at the HP web OS event what I have right here the Revere let me give you an idea of how small it is this is my iPhone 4 right here right next to it and it's as you can see about two-thirds the size with touch pads even smaller than the pre trying to use it myself my hands are really big so the buttons are actually too small for me I'm gonna have to resort to using my fingernails to actually use it to actually get some kind of precision with the buttons one of the new features of webOS 2.0 is just type so basically if you have a card up and you just start typing you'll get a couple of options and like I just type rats just as a random and you can even use that text to go to Google Maps go to Wikipedia to do more research on it or you can like go to Facebook and just post whatever you just type it just feels really small as a camera on the back really lights I feel like people who don't really like larger phones are probably gonna be really be into it we don't know anything about pricing yet or anything about confirmed days so far but stay tuned to see nuts and we'll be bringing you more news I'll be beer during CNET's live blog of the event Donna Bell said that the veer actually looks like a choking hazard that thing is small now stick around for more from HP's event later on in the show so now we've covered iOS and web OS what about Android while Sprint also managed to squeeze in an event of their own this week they showed off a new Android phone called the Kyocera echo and answer the age-old question what do you do when you can't make a phone's touchscreen any bigger add another one New York whereas Prince's unveiled the Kyocera echo this is the first dual touchscreen device and it'll be available later this three as you can see it has two screens and 3.5 inches diagonally in both WB da resolutions they've optimized the software here so you can use applications in standard mode which is just a single screen there is also a tablet mode the feature that I'm most excited about is the simulcast mode which allows you to use two different of applications on the screen at launch it only be available on seven applications mostly the main core features like messaging photo gallery browser but it's a pretty cool feature that I think will take multi-touch into a new level the only no.14 air another feature I'm disappointed about is it's printing a 1 gigahertz Snapdragon processor which may be enough to power this device but everyone's looking to the dual core processor so that's a little bit disappointing one thing we will be checking once we get this a device in for review is battery life they're saying that you'll get about 5 hours of talktime on here and it's performing on par with other smart phones they are shipping the device with an extra battery though so if you do run out I do still have an extra cell with you the karasek up go will run Android 2.2 with no custom UI also has a 5 megapixel camera and will chip with an 8 gigabyte microSD card pre-installed this will be available starting next week for one $99.99 the 2 year contracts for cnet.com I'm Bonnie saw here in New York with the Kyocera echo is it just me or does the echo look a lot like a Nintendo DS maybe we should keep an eye out for a Nintendo phone sometime soon now while we're waiting don't hold your breath let's take a quick break but we'll be right back with more tech review right after this welcome back to the sina tech review our weekly video digests of all things good and bad we've seen here at Sina TV i'm brian tom filling in for Mollywood who's on vacation this week now continuing on in the good this year at CES our cell phone editors pick Motorola's Atrix 4G as our top phone from the show you can head over to seen at tv.com for a full review of the phone itself but before you do that check out this video from Scott Stein he took a look at the Atrix 4G innovative docking station to find out how it stacks up against a regular laptop hi I'm Scott Stein senior associate editor of cnet.com and this is not a laptop this is actually a laptop dock that is connected to the Motorola Atrix 4G smartphone from AT&T now we just reviewed this phone on cnet.com and this dock is a pretty well-known and well hi peripheral we talked about it at CES and it's a it's gotten a lot of attention because it's one of the first laptop docks that's available for a smartphone what is it exactly well as you can see it attempts to sort of expand that Android experience so for a larger screen and we thought hey you've got the smartphone reviewers take why not hear from a laptop editor how it works as a laptop and that's exactly what I'm gonna do on first glance looking at it it's thin it's really nicely designed it sort of feels like a bit like a MacBook almost like the Google Chromebook that we looked at at the end of last year huge trackpad and a slightly compressed keyboard there's nothing inside it though what this is essentially is kind of a dumb dock that connects to the phone which plugs in here on a little swivel dock through a little USB connector and a power connector here and it blows it up on the big screen now in addition to showing what is seen on the on the Atrus itself it also gives you a full firefox 3.6 browser that is baked into this dock the browser is great the OS environment really kind of feels like a sort of a splash top browser those Quick Start os's that sometimes you see on netbooks that give you a couple of functions but not a full OS environment on the other hand the browsing experience is a little bit slower than you would get even on say a netbook based on our initial anecdotal experience it does feel nice and you know Google Docs was a little bit slow you can play flash thanks to the Tegra 2 processor that's built in here so we got flash oh there was a little bit sluggish fairly you know it was about the level experiencial is what you get in a sort of an atom netbook one of the other small neat tricks on this doc is that it has an HD video playback center where you can play back your videos and your photos and your music on the large screen and thanks to the Tegra 2 processor video playback actually looks really great we played back some of the videos we shot on the Atrix and they looked really great on that 11-5 screen so the idea here is that this dock which also has an 8 hour battery built into it and can recharge the Atrix waltz plugged in will function is a little mobile workstation for you you can sit it on your lap or put it on a desk you can view your phone and it's full functionality from within the dock itself so you can actually make phone calls via Bluetooth or otherwise while having it in laptop mode that's pretty cool and you can play back of course any of your apps you can blow them up into a larger screen so blows up the app to a larger size here but take note this is not a touchscreen so you can't do any multi-touch techniques like you would on an iPad as far as ports and peripherals go there are two USB ports in the back here along this lip and you can use Wi-Fi or you can use the 4G data connection but that's it if you unplug the phone from the dock the dock doesn't work on its own so again this is really a docking tool think of it as kind of a smart keyboard more than anything that really is like a laptop there's no internal storage in here I mean really it's just a chassis you know what's surprising this is an Android phone this is a Chromebook like laptop what does the browser do you expect to be on here probably Google Chrome but no it's Firefox the cost is $500 for this dock unless you get it as a package with the phone and a tethering plan in which case the phone and the dock or $500 together now what does that get you in the laptop world it gets you alive I mean $2.99 gets you a 10 inch atom netbook which is the cost of this dock in the bundle package $500 were buying it alone would get you a wide variety of laptops 11 6 laptops including the ones with the new AMD fusion processors you could also get an eye which while won't have a keyboard will give you a lot of that great big screen functionality overall there's a lot of interesting ideas baked into the concept of a laptop phone dock and we'll probably be seeing a lot more of these types of ideas soon it's not there yet particularly if you're spending your own hard-earned money on such a device you really just might be better off having a phone and having a netbook or having an iPad with you but for now it could be an interesting view as to what's to come I'm Scott Stein and this is the Motorola Atrix 4G and it's laptop dock that's by far one of the coolest docks I've ever seen but 500 bucks that's way too much but don't worry Motorola will let you keep your award okay it's about time let's see what we've got this weekend the bad as more and more of our files and documents and data moves into the cloud many of us rarely need a printer very often anymore but if you're still in the market for one and happen to come across this all-in-one printer from Dell I think Justin you would say keep on walking hi I'm Justin new associate editor for cnet.com with the first look at the del V five one five W multifunction printer so unfortunately this all-in-one leaves a lot to be desired straight out of the box it's marred by physical flaws and a bulky design not to mention a cheap to line color LCD display that looks like it belongs more on a graphing calculator so let's take a quick tour of the machine you'll notice it has this bucket design with a 35-page auto document feeder on top that's actually useful for scanning copying and faxing multiple pages or photos you also get a standard flatbed scanner underneath and Dell also includes optical character recognition software that does its best to read a scanned document and import the text into a word processor of your choice the printer has no problem stacking individual sheets of paper in the output tray down here but we did experience several paper jams during testing once we approach the 25 sheet output limit in contrast most other printers we test can hold at least double the amount for the same price so the Dell also comes with a tow 2.11 BG wireless connectivity that's supposed to help you cut the cord and free up USB ports but we experienced a lot of installation errors and too many pop-up messages that gave us a headache and we just defaulted to a hardwired connection after a while we should also note that the V five-on-five is a big ink gutter it uses two separate ink cartridges for tricolor and black and you can also purchase high-capacity cartridges from the website but these standard cartridges that came with the unit didn't last long enough for us to actually finish our tests so be prepared to spend lots of money on ink refills if you choose to buy this machine so with lots of frustrations and expensive ink cartridges the v5 one 5w doesn't have many redeeming factors so instead of purchasing this guy we recommend spending your money on a more capable machine like the less expensive epson workforce 310 or the slightly pricier canon pixma mx870 you can read more details in the whole review on cnn.com but that's gonna do it for me I'm Justin you this is the del V 5 1 5w all in one printer and that sounds pretty good to me so instead of getting that Dell printer you can just do what I do and use the printer at work don't you ok let's go ahead and check out this week's bottom line earlier we saw two new smartphones from HP but the real news that came out of the event was the debut of the touchpad HP's 9.7 inch tablet which also runs on Web OS Donal bill was on hand for the announcement and to help guide us through a hands-on demo hey i'm donald bell for cnet.com we're here at HP's think beyond event in San Francisco where they unveiled their new touchpad tablet a competitor to the iPad that runs the webOS operating system they acquired from Palm let's go take a look at today HP is entering the mobile landscape with a breakthrough new product that shows the power of webOS as a multi device platform this is the HP TouchPad the touchpad nolle looks great feels great in the heads weighs a little more than a pound and a half and it's just over 13 millimeters thick the screen is beautiful bright and viewable from any angle it supports video calling that way and has Beats Audio technology for unparalleled music playback through either built-in stereo speakers or through Beats headphones it's a powerful work tool - and as everything you need to be instantly productive you can access and edit your Microsoft documents since touchpad comes bundled with Quick Office and you can collaborate with colleagues using Google Docs Dropbox and box net the touchpad supports VPN to connect to corporate networks and working with Skype and others to enable video calling if you need to print something and who doesn't touch pad is compatible with HP's Linde industry-leading printing solutions letting you send documents while it's needed tens of millions of HP's networked and wireless printers no matter how you're spending your time online touch pad brings it all together it helps you keep your busy life on track now when you turn it on the first thing you'll notice is argue and this is not just a really great way to get in and I have applications it's really a workspace and you know it's instant-on so being able to turn it on and instantly see what it is you're working on and get right back to it is a really powerful feature now when I'm done with an application I just flick it off the top of the screen like that around the bottom the screen here you'll see we have quick access to a few of the more popular applications that you're going to use and at the top we have notifications we have the ability to actually swipe through and do triage right here it's imagine you're in the browser and you get an email you'll see a text notification come across the top and then go back to the browser you can actually check it out right here so being able to to manage your email and do triage from here is really powerful feature we've done some reformatting of the email application to take advantage of the large display at the touch pad I can drag over like this and that will reveal other messages I have in my inbox so I can easily switch between them and if I didn't want to do a ton of emails I can just drag over here you know I've got more than one account I'm sure you guys probably do too and so being able to just crank through emails and my different folders and accounts and go through them like this is a really powerful way to keep my inbox in check now the other thing I'll show you here is our keyboard this is a five row keyboard and also we let you resize it so this is something I think it's really going to come down to personal preference some people don't want a big or smaller or sometimes you might just want to go big right but we also have a connected photos experience here so this pulls in pictures from both things that you have on the device as well as connected experiences through Facebook photo bucket or Snapfish let me show you another application Kindle the Kindle application gives you access to Amazon's entire online library and I can flip through books flip through pages just like you'd expect that supports bookmarking and note-taking now taking a quick look at our browser we also support flash so what you're used to seeing in a web and the web browser is what you're getting here so I have here my pre 3 and I've looked up a recipe for chicken mushroom panini and if I want to share it with my device I just tap it there like that and so it'd have to be tapped on the sensor itself yes so the sensor is right around here and that's the home button sensor essentially right correct it's not it's not the home button soft but it's it's that's that's where we put this enter for the for the communication between these two that pretty much concludes what I have to show you today the bottom line this week Web OS for the wind well for this week at least now HP seems to be putting all of its eggs in the webOS basket while the landscape is littered with tablets trying to be the next iPad HP is attacking the entire Apple product line by bringing web West to phones tablets and even desktops later in the year ok that's it for this week everyone Molly we'll be back next week with a brand spankin new CNET tech review until then there are tons of great videos available every day at Sina TV com see you next time and thanks for watching