Gadgetory

this week on the cnet tech review highlights from the 2011 new york auto show clever cases for your iphones and ipads will count down the top 5 worst product names in tech and brian proves once again what a chick magnet the ipad really is 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 lines let's start with the good it shouldn't come as a surprise given gas prices these days that the New York Auto Show was all about small cars and better gas mileage this year whether it was eating more efficiency out of Subarus or trying to make a Mercedes into a sexier econo box the message was clear sippers not guzzlers I guess you can call it the new New Beetle though VW doesn't go on is the kooky arched roof giving into something a little more rakish so to the taillights cease paying slavish homage to the past inside this beetle gets a grown-up dash and instrument panel while shedding the little bud vase but offering an upper glove box that does say original car one thing you notice right away is the top of the dash isn't as absurdly deep as it used to be since the windshield base is pushed back and atop the dash three sporty gauges three engine choices as well most exciting to me is a torquey 2-liter TDI that should deliver 29 40 mpg but there's also word of a beetle are with a 270 horsepower turbo motor out of the Gulf are now VW needs this new beetle to deliver more than the seven percent or so of its sales been doing the last couple years if the company wants to hit audacious goals of being the world's biggest carmaker by 2018 the new 2012 beetle arrives in the US September of 2011 here's the new face for the revised ford taurus all kind of angry and menacing looking especially on the show edition and there's new increased sculpting around the body a new shape on the hood now none show tour I will get a light revision as well but the most interesting thing is this will be the first Ford to offer a choice of two EcoBoost engines those are the ones that combine direct injection and turbocharging one will be a new version of the three and a half liter v6 that will now deliver a healthy 290 horsepower and the other will be a little two liter for that should deliver 31 mpg from this big car myford touch will now be available on the LCD screen of a taurus and rumors have it some sort of video streaming could be coming to that system electric power steering will enable the same impressive automatic parking tech we recently saw on the focus the new taurus hits the market in 2012 as a 2013 model subaru has been on a tear in the US but the Impreza has been uninteresting outside of a WRX this new impressive is no looker the sedan is super suburban the hatch looks sporty orrantia come around the back and mistake it for a chipmunk with jowls full of nuts they have downsized the engine dramatically from two and a half to two liters too much improve the cars previous mediocre fuel economy now projected to be 27 36 which subaru claims will make the new Impreza the most fuel-efficient all-wheel drive car in America now that's with a CVT gearbox shift it yourself with the five-speed manual and you'll lose a few mpg oh by the way at the Shanghai show subi also showed off this wilder cousin to the Impreza the XV concept which for the first time would take an Impreza in a crossover direction we'll have more on that when we see it in person ever seen a Mercedes a-class yeah this dorky little thing well forget that and check this the new a-class concept it just went from being about as sexy as an elevator to being a pulse elevator lots of tasty sculpting around it's sort of mini Shooting Brake body style but none of it's so outrageous that you can't squint and see a production car here well except for this highly unlikely interior with all its LED illuminated pods and such those vent nozzles turn red when heating and blue when cooling and of course mercedes is envisioning streaming radio facebook and twitter through a docked smartphone which are pretty much becoming must have technologies right now under hood they see a turbo direct-injected two-liter for that will put 210 horsepower into a 7-speed dual-clutch automated manual to the front wheels also available things like radar adaptive cruise lots of luxury this is likely a real answer to BMWs 1 series and Audi's threes in a world where small and premium no longer seem like odd bedfellows the new Chevy Malibu debuted at Shanghai but a couple of days later dropped a bit of a bombshell in New York that is it'll be available as a mild hybrid called the malibu eco battle team a little 15 horsepower electric motor with a 2.4 liter 4 to give you 20 6 38 mpg also thanks to it having regenerative braking and auto start/stop up front is what they call an expressive face in the auto biz and that feature line along the sill continuing out to the rear bumper gives the car a very rakish stance out back a clear nod to the hind end of a camaro and inside the camaro nod continues with the gauges then over in the center is the new Chevy MyLink head unit which will be a first for GM and that it will have app support for pandora and stitcher streaming and almost certainly more apps after that push the button at the bottom of the screen and the whole thing tilts up for a space to stash your connected i phone the other engine option is a two and a half liter direct injection for that puts 190 horsepower into a 6-speed automatic the new malibu goes on sale first half of 2012 the Malibu is so purple how Barbie although actually if we're talking cute cars i gotta say i am digging the new new beetle now you know the ladies are digging our mutual friend brian Tong but this week he has agreed to pass on some of his unique tech wisdom and tap that up ipad games to help you get girls we're going to tap that app i'm brian song and this is the show we cover the hottest apps in the mobile space and we showcase a lot of games and apps really the best way to use technology is with the ladies so we're going to show you the best ipad games that will help you get girls based on my extensive research now forget about violent games like infinity blade or gun brothers girls don't care and please don't say angry birds are fruit ninja those games are played out and trust me you got to be different from those other nerds so here's my favorite ipad games to get the girl now first up is harbor master HD and it's absolutely free just ask the girl if she likes water do you like water what water here let me show you then bust out the game and all you do is send purple boats to the purple docks and orange boats the orange docks by drawing pass with your fingers you'll need to move boats in and out of the docks and it gets good when the game gets hectic and trust me you'll be multi touching in no time now remember it's free and the best date guys is the one that doesn't hurt your wallet now if you really want to get your game on with the ladies check out what's the difference it'll cost you a chicken mcnugget happy meal at 399 but this is the classic game where you work as a team to spot the differences between two pictures side by side you'll be saying things to each other like are you good at this anymore ooh nice move nice and best of all you can sure that you're a guy who knows how to use his head yeah yeah and my final recommendation little things I know I know don't let the name discourage you it's 299 and it's an innovative seek and fine game you'll work together to find items in a colorful collage of cute icons it's a game that more than two people can play and you know the same the more the merrier but trust me when I tell you it's a good thing when a girl ass can i play with your little things so there you go fellas three games you haven't really heard of to break the ice with that special someone and what's the trend having fun working together and my friends the rest is up to you now if you have any other apps you think are worthy to be here that we missed send them to tap that app patina com i'm brian Tong thanks for watching and we'll see you guys next week who needs okcupid when you've got an ipad of course if an ipad doesn't turn her on maybe the lady in your life could use a vibe in fact this vibe is our editors choice rich brown loves it and here he is with a hands-on review hi I'm rich brown senior editor for cnet com today we're going to take a look at the main gear but super stock so this is an editor's choice winning gaming PC this config cops about twenty nine hundred bucks is one of the fastest desktops we've ever reviewed and it also comes out a nice tidy little package here this may be ur system is very well built and generally we recommend it to anybody in the market for sort of an upper mid-range gaming desktop so just a quick overview the outside you can see it's nice and clean the front panel has a DVD burner up here as well as a media drive here right here you've got a pair of SSD slots pop a little lock the driveways open up and you can pop the drives in and out now despite this is some small size that actually has a nice range of connectivity options here on the back you can see there's two graphics cards here each card has tons of video outputs you can see there's two DVI ports as well as two adapter based mini DisplayPort outputs and here you get a single HDMI out down here on the motherboard ports you get 7.1 audio digital audio output a couple USB 3 s USB to Ethernet e-sata firewire and a couple more USB ports now inside the vibe it's nice and meat which is what we're used to from main gear up here you've got two graphics cards it's a pair of AMD Radeon HD 6950 s down here is an intel core i7 2600 k chip and that's a stock speed of 3.4 gigahertz but main gears overclock that 24 18 between that chip and these two cards this is one of the fastest systems we've ever seen now there's a couple memory sticks here you can actually add two more if you want to go to 16 gigs that's probably overkill for now anyway you've got room for three hard drives over here now there's one SSD drive installed already now it's actually a 250 gigabyte drive it's probably a little excessive you can actually go into a 120 gig drive on makers website not four hundred dollars out of the price of the system so it's probably not the worst idea down here you've got a one terabyte standard hard drive and you got a free drive spot here now the system does come with wireless networking integrated but there are a few other upgrade options available on the motherboard you get a 1 x pci express slot here and here and there's a single pci slot available between the two cards now you don't have room to add a third graphics card to this PC but there is still plenty of room to upgrade and more than we would expect from a system that's kind of small like this so as you said the system is one of the fastest we've ever tested and it will also play any game out there at high image quality and high resolution so between its speed its value and its design this is one of the best gaming PC's out there right now so I'm rich brown this is an editor's choice winning main gear vibe super stuff what did you think I meant get your minds out of the gutter people and while you take a moment to wash your brains out with soap we're gonna take a break we'll be right back for more tech review right after this you 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 many new iPad and iPhone owners are compelled to buy cases to protect their pricy new purchases if you're one of those people you might consider a case that actually adds functionality to your iDevice like these two right here hi I'm Scott Stein senior editor at cnet com and this is not a netbook this is an iPad to dock into the Logitech keyboard case by zagg for the ipad 2 it's not even plugged in it just rests here and for those people that are looking for a perfect keyboard solution for their iPad hey at a keyboard it's just like a laptop well this is the type of device you might be looking for at $99 it's a pretty good price compared to other iPad peripherals and it doubles as a case and as you can see it's a real keyboard this isn't a sort of glued on rubbery keyboard or any sort of a fake oh feeling keyboard this keyboard has keys that feel like a real keyboard although compressed it's a little more like the keyboard you'd find on a netbook it's not a real full-size keyboard but the fact that it comes inside this case and allows the ipad 2 to be stood up with in it makes it a really nice solution for an all-in-one type of device now there are some drawbacks the case is not really a perfect case for the ipad it does allow the ipad to fold down and store it inside it but you can't really easily remove it so it's not going to be a sort of case you want to take with you on a subway for some quick ipad reading also call us crazy even though there are rubberized bands here that will protect contact against the keyboard when the iPads folded down makes us a little bit nervous to get this glass up close to a keyboard on the other hand this has some really nice ergonomic features to it you can stand this thing up in a landscape or portrait mode you can flip it up like this now the back connector over here is a flip-up plastic it's not great it's probably one of the weakest parts of the case but it does the job and allows it to stand up it also has a really nice set of bluetooth keys here the control functions on the ipad you may not even be aware that it could control for instance there's volume control track skipping for music there's also undo and redo buttons so if you're working in a word processing they'll actually work it also has cut and paste buttons but of course if you're going to be using those you do still have to select text on the screen so that may be in reaching up and touching the screen you're actually typing on this keyboard really does make it feel like a laptop kind of gives us nice little coffee shop vibe you can relax and lose yourself in your writing a little bit just got to be careful because after you work on this for a while you're going to wonder where that Masser that trackpad is and you're going to have to press back on that screen it gets a little bit confusing this logitech keyboard connects by bluetooth so that's why there's no dock connector here or 30 pin connector you just set up bluetooth on your ipad then you turn the keyboard on and you hit the connect button you've already set it up for pairing it's good to go the first time it will ask you to enter a four digit code on your keyboard to initiate the pairing process this also has a micro USB connector and its own little charge cable for plugging in via USB to charge the battery on this case it's long enough of a charge you're really not going to worry about charging at too many times overall it's actually a really nice attractive case and it creates a nice clean profile for the ipad 2 really makes it look like a laptop if you're looking for a keyboard you really might want to check this one out I'm Scott's time and this is the Logitech keyboard case by zagg for the ipad 2 i'm nicole a senior associate editor for cnet.com and this is a first look at the logo talk XD the logo talk XD is an iphone case but it also has a built-in bluetooth headset on the back as a case it's a pretty normal looking iphone case if it's very snugly around the iphone there are all the buttons at the right place it should be there cutouts for the jacks so it's overall a pretty decent iphone case in general what sets the talk XD apart is that on the back here is a little bluetooth headset this means that the case has a slight hump back on the back here to get the bluetooth headset out all you have to do is press down on the left side here and it will pop out of the charging cavity the bluetooth headset itself as you can see is extremely skinny it's around less than 0.2 inch on the side of the bluetooth headset here is a very tiny multifunction call button on the other side here are the two charging points for charging in the case the ear piece of the headset can be folded open just by clicking it forward and the headset can be fitted to fit in either ear the head side comes with a variety of different earbud tips while the headset is in the very skinny and slim it actually fits pretty comfortably in the ear also on the bottom of the case here is a micro USB charging port to charge the bluetooth headset you can charge both the iphone and it hits at the same time because of the two different openings the bluetooth headset has to be paired with the iphone it doesn't pair automatically just because you put the case on however it does pair quite easily the bluetooth headset is the usual bluetooth headset features you can answer calls and calls and reject calls because the iphone is close at hand you don't need to use the volume controls on the headset just use the volume controls on the iphone however the bluetooth headset doesn't have a lot of advanced features it doesn't have a two DP it doesn't have onboard volume controls like we said and it also does not have multi-point connectivity that lets it connect up to two devices at once overall we think mean we'll go talk XD is a pretty clever idea after all Bluetooth headsets are notoriously easy to lose or misplace this way it's always close at hand perhaps our only issue is that it's a little bit expensive at one hundred dollars retail but you can't find a cheaper online I am Nicole and this has been a first look at the Mogo top XD while those both seem like really good ideas they're not cheap and they're definitely going to add some bulk to your portable devices but if neither one of those things bothers you don't let me talk you out of it let's just move along and see what's bad this week instead naming products and services in the tech world can be a tricky proposition for example how many of you know that cnet used to officially be named cnet with a little pipe character and it actually stood for the computer network that was fine but after some time we became cnet networks or computer network networks awkward as that maybe it's nothing compared to the five truly terrible tech names in this week stop by let's face it folks tech manufacturers make tech for a living they make screams operating systems processors little buttons and stuff where they fall down all too often is when they name their gear I'm Brian Cooley with the top five stupidest names for tech products in recent memory ranked in order of how much they made us cringe here at the scene head offices number five is a tie between two products that violate the first rule of reading the room never call yourself cool unless you rap for a living but the cooler ereader and cool the search engine missed that lesson the cooler reader just wasn't it was a second-rate half bait cut-price ripoff of both the Kindle and the ipod so it has the unoriginal ur name that it could have claimed now cool was a search engine that claimed to do what Google does but faster and better the name was one of those we in the media biz say needs a pronounced ER never go to market with a name like that some saw it meeting cool as the founders intended others thought it said quill which had kind of founding fathers tonality to it and I just saw call which is what happened to it number four is the samsung smiley you know smiley they branded it with both the word and the emoticon and tried to position it as the happy phone asking what about it will make you happy you know it'll make me happy this thing going off the market number three is the pentax issed pronounced pissed but with a leading asterisk in the structural tradition of a das wild card cuz you know that's cool the idea was sort of this is the DSLR for whatever your passions are whether you're an artist botanist naturist or anesthesiologist which works because they put this line to sleep in late two thousand six number two is the olympus em robe i actually forgot about this one had to go look it up it was a line of portable audio and video players the name supposedly a contraction of music wardrobe that's idiotic and it used proprietary file transfer called yep em trip which actually made sony sonicstage look good olympus is blessedly out of the media player business now but that unfortunately gives them more time to come up with unnerving stuff like this colonoscopy camera with an obscene flexible tip before we get to our number one worst named tech product a reminder a bad name does not keep a good product down you recall the groaning when steve-o announced ipad and we all had our jaws in our laps when nintendo announced we and can there be a Dorking your geekier name than android danger Will Robinson hey so you see cooler you could have been a hit if you just hadn't sucked okay the number one worst name for a tech product hands down no exceptions for the remainder of history is this media player called I beat blacks what I mean Sharpton's on the phone right now for me just reading this all right in defensive maker Trek store they are a small company located in Lorsch South hesiod Germany well known as the Silicon Valley of the former third reich anyway from what I've seen they were genuinely horrified when someone who's actually heard English spoken explained to them what they've just called their product so they fired their VP of brand development David Duke and soldiered on with a name change to the only moderately disturbing trick store blacks for more top 5s like this one well none are quite like this one go to top 5 cnet com I'm Brian Cooley thanks for watching wow that did not really happen did it that I be okay well that is a bad name Tech or otherwise let's just go ahead and check out this week's bottom line shall we Apple's been in the news a little bit lately over charges that the iPhone stores a huge unencrypted cache of your location data apple says it's not tracking you and the data is just more access points in cell towers than visits to dirty book stores but still until they roll out the fixes they say they're working on here's how to lock down some of that stuff before any private investigators come looking Brian song Hasina calm and one of the hot topics in the tech world is apple's tracking all of your location data on your iphone or ipad as a file even if you choose to turn off the location services setting on your idevice now the data is being stored in an unencrypted file potentially accessible by anyone who's up to no good with some basic technical skills this file is stored not only on your mobile device but there's also copied that saved on your computer's hard drive when it backs up files from an iphone or ipad while syncing with itunes now the good news is that apple's not uploading this data file to their internal servers but it still lives on your idevice or computer and the data has mapped out your location and whereabouts as far back as a year now there are plenty of you out there that care about your privacy so what can you do to protect yourself this file will live on your phone in you really can't do anything about that but your best bet is to encrypt the iTunes backup that lives on your computer so first up plugging your iDevice with its USB cable into your Mac or PC then select your device in the left-hand column of iTunes when it launches find the options section and check the box next to encrypt iphone backup choose a password that's unique and make sure you don't forget it but once you do this the file on your computer will be protected I'm Brian town for cnet com with your how-to for protecting location data use it wisely the bottom line this week bug chef right and while you're at it all of you playstation 3 players might want to go ahead and change all your passwords and cancel your credit cards i mean i know a sony says they don't know for sure if the credit card information was taken in their recent hack attack but do you feel like you can trust anyone lately all right folks that's our show will be back next week with a brand new Cena tech review until then there are tons of great videos available every day at Cena TV com see you next time and thank you for watching