Gadgetory

this week on the cnet tech review facebook launches new features and ruffle some feathers HTC thinks it's time for the plum colored rhyme a look back at apples biggest flops and a site that offers to manage your social life for you it's all coming up right now hi everyone I'm Hollywood and welcome to the senior 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 our own unique tech wisdom in the form of the bottom line let's start with the good we'll get to my facebook gripes in a bit here but first HTC's long rumored bliss handset made its debut in New York this week and it's actually called The Rime and not the bliss we sent Bridget Carey the newest member of the cnet TV family to get the scoop on this decidedly female friendly phone hi I'm Bridget Carey wits cnet TV here with your first look at the HTC Rhyme I'm at the launch event here in New York and they didn't exactly say this was for women but you kind of get that vibe because it comes in purple and has lots of accessories like the one I'm holding right here you might be wondering what is this dangling thing it's called the charm so you plug it in and let it stick out your purse and it lights up when you have a missed call or someone's calling you have a text message it also comes with a docking station that kind of reminds you of like an alarm clock you can put it by your bed and it also comes with headsets as you can see the headsets are a flat rubber so it's supposed to not get tangled as easily because we all just hate when that happens sold separately are also some other matching accessories like the plum colored bluetooth headset or a speaker visor for your car and also a workout armband so the phone itself has a nice feminine feel the specs inside aren't too bad it comes with two cameras one five megapixel in the back and another one in the front for video chatting it's a 3.7 inch screen a 1 gigahertz processor it has four gigs of memory internal 8 gigs in a separate SD card now as far as the interface goes you're going to notice there are slightly different tweaks in this HTC sense like the ability to just quickly get a glance at your latest mail or messages without having to go all the way into the program and the camera itself has a few other tweaks like being able to take five shots at once in 2.5 seconds so ladies if having some accessories tickles your fancy it's going to be available September 29th that Verizon for 199 and that includes the three accessories like the charm the charging dock and the matching earphones for cnet TV I'm Bridget Carey thanks Bridget and welcome aboard and yes let's just actually say that the rhyme is really aimed at women well women and prints honestly I hope HTC was nice enough to give him one for free the new fall TV season is in full swing with a whole slew of new shows hitting the airwaves one such show is the new CBS series person of interest which imagines a world where no one is safe from the prying eyes of government surveillance kind of like Facebook Brian Cooley visited the person of interest set to find out just how close the show might be to real life the eyes that never sleep in streets on buildings at ATMs 50 million video cameras silently rolling on our every move capturing our location and when we were there four billion hours a week recorded typically and monitored live possibly and all of it at the core of a new CBS drama the CBS show person of interest revolves around this concept of a machine that can hear see and therefore no just about anything about any of us who's doing what with that information that's part of the mystery you have a decision to make machine gave you another number the leads on our show are doing work that they're uncertain out they feel ethically uncertain about and yet compelled to pursue it most of them are just ordinary people like her a thousand two thousand five thousand different images simultaneously this machine can see all at once it's almost like you know dare I say big guy even if you think you can get through the day without being caught on video your cell phone can sell you out eighty-three percent of american adults now carry one thirty five percent a smartphone with advanced integration into their daily lives the public wanted to be protected they just didn't want to know how they were being protected the government been actively trying to build exactly the sort of databasing technology that we talked about in the pilot that we feature in the show for at least ten years so when they finally got a system that were kept it secret so while person of interest envisions a specific machine in fact we already live with one the connectable dots of many forms of everyday surveillance that are perhaps even more powerful than what finch and reese work with really gives you something to think about doesn't it we'll have more from Cooley's visit to the set later in the show if that piece has scared you into giving up your smartphone it doesn't mean you have to stop taking photos and sharing them with your friends here's Josh Goldman with a new point and shoot camera from Samsung that has plenty of social networking features built right inside hey there I'm Josh Goldman with CNN and this is a look at the samsung sh100 so it's probably no surprise that smartphones are killing some of the sales of lower end point and shoots with all the apps and instant uploading there's just no way to compete with that however the sub $200 sh100 is a solid attempt for starters it has built-in Wi-Fi that can be used for quickly connecting to a hotspot for wireless uploads to facebook or sending off in an email the Wi-Fi can also be used to backup photos to a PC or connect to smartphones for use as a remote viewfinder all you have to do for that is just download an app available for Samsung Galaxy devices and the iphone 4 support for other Android devices is in the works anyway you just open the app and you can use it to connect the sh100 to your device and use it to control the camera the camera is also loaded with photo and movie filters and some simple editing tools and the 3 inch touchscreen on back makes using them pretty easy plus you can drag and drop icons around just like you would on a smartphone now photo quality isn't much better than you get from a smartphone particularly low light shots but for sharing online they look very good and you do get a 26 millimeter wide angle lens with a 5x zoom and you really don't get that with a phone basically with this camera you get a lot of the same benefits of your smartphone's camera but with a better lens faster performance and more comfortable shooting I'm Josh Goldman and the Samsung sh100 I do miss having an optical zoom on my camera phone but i'm not sure i miss it enough to start carrying both a phone and the camera again while we're on the topic of social networking is anyone else feeling overwhelmed trying to manage all of your alert settings or missing posts that you should have seen if so Sharon Vaknin has yet another service to sign up for but this one aims to help you manage all the rest what if you get a text message every time someone posts an apartment listing on craigslist or maybe you'd like to automatically backup facebook photos to your dropbox i'm sharing backing frisina com here to show you how to use a web app called if this then that which lets you automate tasks for web services like facebook dropbox twitter flickr and more if this then that or if as i like to call it is based on the simple logic of its name if this happens on one service then do that on another service here's how it works head to ifttt com enter some new account information and once you confirm your email address you'll see the dashboard to start things off click create a task on the next page click this and you'll see a couple dozen web services more are being added but if this then that added the most popular ones first also you'll need to activate most of the channels before you can use them but only the first time around so as an example today I'll make it so that whenever I favor to tweet the article from that tweet will be added to instapaper which is really useful for me since I get a lot of news from Twitter but can't always read it right away to do that first I'm going to select Twitter if you haven't activated it yet you'll need to do so now so now you're presented with many triggers for this I'll select new favorite tweet then create trigger to select an action channel click that I'm going to select Instapaper then read later for the action if this then that fills the section out for you so just click create action give your task a name and then click create now whenever I favor tweet it will be added to my Instapaper account you can create hundreds of combinations for tasks but if you go to the recipes section you'll see that many people have already created many useful ones for you just filter by service and when you find the task you want click the arrow then create task to enable it I personally like that this site uses text message actions notifying you via SMS about anything from a new post on craigslist to a brand-new how to blog on cnet com play around with the tasks and recipes and let me know which useful ones you find by tweeting me or leaving a comment on my facebook page for cnet I'm Sharon Vaknin and i'll see you on the interwebs great now I can set it up to call my phone every time I get a new gmail message I'm sure that wouldn't be annoying at all information overload much while you work out all of your trigger combos I am going to take a break but stick around there's a lot more tech review coming up right after this welcome back to the scene at tech review our weekly video digest of all things good and bad we've seen your at cnet TV continuing on in the good let's check back in with Brian Cooley on the set of person of interest for some behind-the-scenes secrets and whether the Machine might really exist I'm Brian Cooley from cnet com or on location in prospect park brooklyn with richard j lewis the producing director of person of interest in his CBS fall series richard as we're watching this take place and people have to detect a certain a certain discomfort between the characters the technology that they're using that's a key part of what the whole energy isn't this show isn't it I think it is I mean I think there's a real kind of mystery around not only Reese and Finch the two lead characters of the show but the technology that is instituted to uncover or surveil all the people of New York City a wireless camera you can keep an eye on them from anywhere we call it the machine and the machine can detect a violent act that is about to happen to a victim or perpetrator Finch gets a social security number and basically he knows which person the person of interest is going to be that person of the week you have a decision to make machine gave you another number where is the machine you know it's funny i asked i asked Jonah Nolan where the machine was and he said I don't know maybe in Fort Knox maybe not we don't know that's part of the mystery that's part of the idea around the show is that there's there's a lot of enigmatic stuff we leave in 1984 it's just like you know 28 years ago just a little late all being looked at we're all being listened to every transaction we make every time we get on the subway when we use the e zpass to go over a bridge we're being trapped we're being tracked globally by satellites we're being tracked all over the map in lower Manhattan there's at least 4,000 surveillance cameras they can see 360 they can actually rotate on axes they can pan they can tilt and they can think techniques of facial recognition looking an IRS looking at stride the other way they think is basically by discerning what an object is and the computer is programmed to understand certain shapes and it becomes pretty interesting becomes a little unnerving let's use the real I think it's a very scary part where I have to agree with its provocative material it's scary it's stuffed in it's stuff that's happening to us right now then you hack into their cell phone in fact it's interesting to note that even if our cell phone is off the authorities can tap into the microphone in the cell phone and hear a conversation in the vicinity that's one of the most eerie things you see in this show is how the cell phone becomes this eavesdropping device without really any apparent effort this is not some server room this is not some sterile technology environment we're here in the normal real world a street in New York it's where where they're sending that information because they're sending that information to a bank of servers that go on forever and ever it's like a huge kind of I like a giant insect I in which you see a thousand two thousand five thousand different images simultaneously this machine can see all at once you know it's almost like you know dare I say big guy now we're watching your monitor here Richard and things look like film but I know you're not shooting with film cameras we're using an aerial Alexa which has a very interesting film grain look we're able to kind of color time and and get proper exposure and looks various looks and you're doing that it sounds like in real time where most of us effects we would do that in post in some final cut thing on the fly right now what's really interesting about using digital the digital medium is being able to control it on the spot and that's what we're doing and we have a number of different types of cameras that we use as you know the world has all these different surveillance cameras we have our own this is your big camera this is the pro cameras like you're losing a bunch of basically surveillance cameras look for a show about surveillance right we want to separate the two looks we want to make sure that people know when its surveillance and we downgrade that image and we mess with it and screwing it this is our HD POV and it is a fantastic camera see this lens right here it's essentially an equivalent to about an eight millimeter fisheye lens really what really why sometimes I'll take it and I'll put it in the corner of an elevator or we'll put it on an ATM machine or we'll put it you know in a phone booth it's a really important tool that we use all the time I found it but somebody else found him first you're blending looks in a production today that I don't think was necessarily the case in most productions up until fairly recently because there wasn't an array of video looks or languages was there no I mean I think filmmakers like Oliver Stone Martin Scorsese in the past they have blended these looks Tony Scott you know they have used super 8 footage use video footage used 60 and 35 and I think now that language is coming into television and you know we're hoping to be sort of and doing that been talking richard j lewis producing director of person of interest CBS series that airs 9 p.m. eastern on thursday nights eight o'clock central i'm brian cooley from cnet com I hope Michael Emerson really is one of the good guys this time but we've fallen for that one before haven't we alright now let's see what we can find in the bad in light of recent success stories like the iPhone the iPad even the Mac itself it's easy to forget that Apple has also had its share of failures over the years so for all you Apple haters out there feel free to gloat as coolly counts down this week's top five Apple's had so many hits the last 15 years or so it really seems cheap and small and petty to run down there duds the boy is it fun I'm Brian Cooley with top five Apple flops ranking these is real subjective so I went the way you would let's rank him by how much you can get for them on eBay here we go the number 5 apple flop is the Newton OS message pads this is going to raise hackles since descendants iphone and ipad are now apples biggest business but Apple made like six models of the message pad and Motorola made some and sharp took a whack Adam and nobody could get it right it was just this slow-motion disaster I recall when these were new and they were scorned everywhere and didn't they have Newton's stores too what a mess price wise these don't fetch a lot 30 to 50 bucks for one on ebay number for the mac g4 cube we've never seen a computer like this and it's short time in production keeps it that way this silent fanless monolith with a toaster slot on top for CDs was real different but thanks for that odd shape you couldn't really put any expansion cards in it back at a time when you actually cared about such things and it was pricing about 200 bucks more than a conventionally shaped mac that had similar performance oh and the cases often cracked which is really annoying on a machine you pay top dollar for for its looks they made about a hundred and fifty thousand of these so they aren't real hard to find on eBay and they seem to fetch about a hundred or two hundred bucks number three was the Pippin remember this one it was produced with van die of Japan rolled out around 96 as a game console with a lite version of system 7 on it as its OS it was gutless it was damn near nothing to run on it in terms of titles and the price was like 600 bucks about 850 in today's dollars forty-two thousand or so were made ebay prices top out around four hundred bucks or so for a really clean unit number two is the 20th anniversary Mac it was one of the first things Steve Jobs killed when he came back to the company and I suspect he did it inside a pentagram because this thing is so not him like all crap labeled executive it's full of form over function for 7,500 dollars over ten thousand bucks in today's money you'd get an all-in-one design okay kind of cool with a small 12 inch display and beyond that not much interesting oh there was a Joey pouch disk tray in front and buttons on the front panel arranged for looks instead of works the whole thing came off like sharper image had a one-night stand with Bang & Olufsen and the 20th anniversary Mac was star-crossed from the beginning it launched in 1997 Apple's 21st year that said you seem to be able to get about 700 bucks for a good complete one on ebay before I take you to the number one Apple flop ranked by eBay price let's consider one so awful and so unimportant it doesn't even deserve a true spot on the list that damn round USB puck mouse from the original iMac totally round so you never knew which way to point it sighs so only a raccoon could articulate it and just ugly with that bad late 90s semi-translucent plastic with Jolly Rancher color accents this thing was a mess I found a basket of 20 of them on ebay for 35 bucks overpriced my number one Apple flop Macintosh TV I'd actually forgotten about this this was the first black mac it was basically a Mac performa that had a Sony Trinitron television bolted to it and a cable tuner inside you could use it as a computer or switch to watching TV but you couldn't watch TV in a window or anything cool like that it made a mockery of the word integration about 10,000 were made so there's a handful of them sticking up ebay any given day at around eight hundred dollars now for the brighter side of life don't miss my other companion video to this top 5 Steve Jobs greatest hits that's also available at top 5 cnet com I'm Brian Cooley thanks for watching to steal a phrase from brian Tong those are truly some bad apples although there is something about that lil McIntosh TV it's a little clunky but that black case is pretty slick alright with that let's move right along to this week's bottom line Facebook rolled out yet another redesign this week and just like clockwork the masses immediately took to the site to complain about the changes and that was even before the f8 conference held yesterday we're even bigger changes were announced take a look at what the future holds in store for facebook hi Rafe Needleman from CNN here at the Facebook f8 Developers Conference we're very polished Mark Zuckerberg just announced some important new changes in the way people share information and connect with friends we've been working on it all year and we're calling it timeline this is very very exciting for every entrepreneur is trying to build an audience and build a personalized web experience for their audience using the Facebook products first there's a new view of what you're doing what you've done on face book called the timeline now with this everything you do from taking photos to cooking shows up in one place in chronological order information is summarized automatically as you go further back in time and users can customize most aspects of the timeline to show friends how they want to appear whether it's you're endorsing a friend posting a job maybe you just change jobs or maybe you just got a promotion things that are important to you professionally that should go into this new timeline and Facebook now this is a developer's conference and this news is big for facebook developers now they'll be able to get data into the timeline automatically and without spamming users profile pages every time someone say goes for a run or listens to a track of music he has this nice running app that he's using to keep track of his runs and I think that's pretty cool so I'm just going to hover over it and click add to timeline and I'm going to get this nice pop up and I can just click on it add to my timeline it's right on my timeline most of these activities will appear in the new Facebook ticker the live view of what people are doing in real time on Facebook six of my friends are watching and episode of glee on hulu and i can just hover over that and click and watch it in a new social canvas app that hulu has built and that's another key point for users and especially for media services like spotify and i heart radio and video sites like netflix we think the radio listening experience is inherently social that people love to talk to their friends about stuff they like to go places in the old days it was the request line it was the song dedications now they're able to virtually by using Facebook your friends can see what you're doing immediately and pop up their own windows to show the same show and watch it with you you have complete control over your timeline what you show there how you display it and who can see it to share the media that you're viewing on facebook with your friends in real time is rolling out today the Timeline view is rolling out in beta today and to the general population in a few months it's the story of your life you have all your stories all your apps and a new way to express who you are for cnet i'm rafe needleman the bottom line this week facebook is your entire life they've now collected everything you've ever done and made it easier to collect everything you ever will do everywhere you go Wow hey but maybe seeing it all collected like that will freak us out and make us share less yeah not likely alright that's it for this time everyone but come back next week for an all-new cnet 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 you