Gadgetory

this week on the cnet tech review new honeycomb tablets keep our labs buzzing how to root your android phone and why you would want to in the first place take the drive-in theater wherever you go and how to put the kibosh on annoying facebook updates 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 plus offer our unique tech wisdom in the form of the bottom line let's get started with the good the motorola xoom was the first device on the market to run honeycomb the tablet only version of the android OS now it's got company though from a flood of new honeycomb based tablets here are Eric Franklin with the LG G slate and Donald bell with the acer iconia tab as only the second tablet to use the honeycomb OS the team of OG slate with google by LG will garner a lot of attention most want to know how it compares to the zoom so let's get that out of the way right now first off the G slate is smaller sporting an 8.9 inch screen compared to the zooms 10.1 inch screen it also supports t mobile's 4g network includes a 3d camera and features the pre installed app t mobile TV which offers streaming TV and on-demand movies the tablet also includes full flash support out of the box those are the major changes with so many tablets being released this year we don't recommend signing up for a new data plan but you should know that the no contract price for the G slate is 750 dollars by signing up for a two-year plan with tmobile you can get the tablet for 630 dollars plus a 100-dollar mail-in rebate bringing the price down to five hundred and thirty dollars at those prices is cheaper than a zoom with a verizon data plan but not quite as cheap as the ipad 2 again we don't recommend signing up with any carrier until the dust on the tablet landscape has settled also no word yet on a Wi-Fi only version of the g slate weight-wise the g slate is only slightly heavier than the ipad 2 but like the zoom those heftier due to its odd weight distribution it's also nearly a third thicker than the ipad 2 in landscape mode its screen measures as wide as the ipad tues but it's about an inch shorter in height the g slight feels comfortable in our hands while typing whether in landscape or portrait mode and unlike the ipad 2 with its smooth as silk metal casing the g slate isn't as likely to slip our grip on its bottom side the tablet includes ports for mini USB and mini HDMI on the top is a volume rocker and microphone pinhole to speakers can be found on the right side with another on the left also on the left is the power/lock button a headphone jack and a power adapter slot input accessing the G site SIM card is a little more involved and we like there's a hidden panel on the back requiring you to push down and slide it up revealing the SIM card as well as the reset button underneath these days you can't have a tablet without a built-in camera usually to legislate attempts to one-up the competition by not only including a front-facing 2-megapixel camera but also a 5 megapixel 3d camera on the back the silver panel here isn't a kickstand sorry sometimes a silver panel is just a silver panel unlike the zoom the G slate includes an IPS screen with a noticeably wider viewing angle surfing speeds under 4G we're faster than the zoom and iPad using 3g especially on busy sites but using 4g did drain the battery something quick if you're expecting good looking 3d on the G slate prepare to be disappointed first off it uses anaglyphic red and blue glasses which while more practical and cheaper than active shutter lenses results in a lower quality image in the end the g site screen all classes a zoom while motorola spins its thumbs on 4g support t-mobile delivers it out of the box while the 3d is shot early implemented some will find some use for it also the content on tmobile TV won't suit everyone's taste but it's still a convenient way to get live TV and on-demand movies on your tablet aalto thanks to a slightly lower price higher quality screen and extra features the tmobile g slate with google is a better value than the zoom with a verizon data plan however the ipad 2 is still the tablet to beat check out the full review for more details on the tmobile g slate hey I'm Donnell bell today we're taking a first look at the iconia tab from Acer this is a Wi-Fi only contract free tablet running Google's Android Honeycomb OS and priced attractively at four hundred and forty nine dollars honeycomb made its debut on the motorola xoom early in 2011 and we criticized the tablet for being a little too pricey and too bulky to compete with the ipad with the iconia tab acer is at least answering one of our requests pricing their tablet at four hundred and fifty dollars less than the Wi-Fi only zoom while maintaining nearly all of its features like the zoom you get a 10.1 inch screen that's great for videos and web browsing there's a built in hdmi output for mirroring HD content onto your TV you get a 5 megapixel camera on the back a 2 megapixel camera on the front both of which can be used to chat over the included google talk app the Android Honeycomb experience here is pretty much what you'd expect acer puts a few of their own bundled apps on the home screen but if you don't like them they're easy to clear off and replace with something else the bad news is that acer hasn't cut any of the bulk we saw in the zoom in fact it's a tad heavier and when you hold it up next to the slim down ipad to the difference is dramatic still we're happy to see honeycomb reach a price below the iPad and hopefully this will be a trend that will keep seeing throughout the year for cnet.com i'm donna bell and this is the acer iconia tab a500 and believe it or not those are not the only honeycomb tablets to pass through the lab this week head on over to seen at tv.com to see Eric's review of the ax Seuss epad transformer and it's snazzy keyboard / docking station next up is a pair of products that can help turn your home office into a DIY photo studio without breaking the bank hey there I'm Josh Goldman senior editor with cnet and this is a look at the nikon coolpix s9100 now like all point-and-shoot makers nikon continues to push just how much lens can be jammed into a compact camera this one is packing a 25 millimeter wide angle lens with an 18x zoom that's longer and wider than most in this category it's also using a 12 megapixel backside illuminated CMOS sensor that improves low-light photo quality and shooting performance and this camera is fast there's almost no shutter lag and it shot to shot time is barely more than a second the only time it really slows down is when you pop up the flash actually using the camera is nice to nikon's s-series cameras are geared for point-and-shoot use so you won't find any manual controls beyond changing exposure compensation is o or white balance what you will find are a lot of automatic modes to help you get the best results without worrying too much about settings and that includes some special effects that can help spice up otherwise boring photos the S 9100 also captures movies in Full HD at 30 frames per second or high speed videos for a slow-motion effect zoom lens works while shooting regular movies but the movement gets picked up by the stereo mic on top so in quiet scenes you will hear it a bit otherwise the clips are pretty good and photo quality is good too but average for this type of camera there's some lens distortion in the corners at the wide end and if you're a stickler for sharpness or fine details when photos are viewed at full resolution well then this camera probably isn't for you but for its price and shooting flexibility most people after a decent snapshot should be pretty happy with the results I'm Josh Goldman and that's the nikon coolpix s9100 thanks for watching hi I'm Justin you with cnet com with the first look at the canon pixma mg 60 120 multifunction printer we had a few issues with the touch sensitivity on the control panel but its missteps are definitely offset by its competent Home Office capabilities and those include HD movie print simple installation and dual paper trays on the top and bottom that can hold up to 300 sheets of paper at a time the mg 60 120 takes on a new design that incorporates folding trays all around to keep the footprint relatively small and easy to transport despite the rear mounted auto document feeder and its six individual ink tanks inside but the most interesting design change comes in the form of this interactive touch sensitive control panel as you can see the only tactile button you get is for power all the other buttons light up on an as-needed basis depending on the function you're accessing the controls also work in conjunction with this 3-inch LCD screen that lifts forward from the middle and tilts back into the unit the new button style is easy to use but we're hoping that cannon will let us adjust the sensitivity in future models as the current setting is so sensitive that we found ourselves accessing the wrong buttons accidentally along with the standard multifunction duties like copy print and scan the mg 60 120 also includes canons HD movie print feature that will let you pull still snapshots out of videos shot with compatible HD Canon cameras in terms of performance the mg 60 120 registers impressive output speed in two out of the four tests but did fall behind the competition printing text prints and photos that said this printer may not be the quickest performer for graphic design offices but we would not hesitate to recommend its output quality in a boardroom presentation and you can read more about all those features and performance scores for this printer in its full review on cnet com but that's going to do it for me I'm Justin you you just took a first look at the canon pixma ng 60 120 one printer thanks for watching yes you could spend a lot more money for a DSLR camera and a high-end photo printer but if you just like to take a lot of snapshots and want to print out a few of your favorites those two goodies should do just fine meanwhile back in the world of Android last week Sharon Vaknin showed us how to back up our Android phones during that video she also talked a little bit about rooting your phone if you don't know what she was talking about Seth Rosenblatt is here to explain what rooting your phone means and how to do it rooting your Android phone used to be a complicated process involving about a dozen steps and arcane rituals best left to folks like Anton LaVey nowadays it's much simpler there's an app for that hi i'm seth rosenblatt foreseen it and today i'm going to show you how to gain root access on your android phone actually there's more than just one rooting app but the one I'll be using today is super one click if you have an HTC phone you want to use the unrevoked non-market app to root and remove the nand lock for unrevoked simply download run the installer on your desktop and follow the instructions before we begin i'm going to caution you be careful when you root your phone it will void your warranty and it's possible to break your phone even with a one click rooting app generally that only happens when the one-click process gets interrupted but one more time please be careful for example if your main computer is a laptop make sure it's plugged in so you're not draining the battery while rooting alright all that said let's get this started note that these are general instructions and that there might be device specific idiosyncrasies you ought to know about before you begin so do your research first download super one click and save it to your desktop but do not run it not yet next connect your phone to your computer but do not mount the SD card that means that you should not turn on USB storage double check by going to settings SD card and phone storage and unmount the SD card what you do want though is to enable USB debugging if you don't have a notification that will take you to it go to settings application settings development and enable USB debugging go back to your computer and double-click on super one click x e choose the samsung captivate tab if that's your phone for all others except those made by HTC choose the universal tab last click the root button and go get yourself a tasty beverage this is going to take a while if you want to sit and watch it you ought to see a bunch of activity scrolling by with ok appearing after each one you might see some warnings too but they're nothing to worry about as long as superoneclick doesn't freeze after routing is complete it's a good idea to check for an app called super user with a skull and crossbones icon and to allow non-market apps to install if you haven't set that up yet either go to settings applications and check unknown sources finally reboot your phone and you ought to be ready to breathe in the rarefied air that all rooted android owners share it smells like victory so that's how you root your android using superoneclick keep an eye out for the companion video to this one how to install a custom android rom remember always be safe when routing from cnet I'm Seth Rosenblatt great my phone is totally routed now what will come back after the break for the second half of the process installing a customized Android ROM and we'll be right back for 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 continuing on in the good when we last left Seth he had just finished helping you avoid your Android phones warranty by rooting it well if you made it this far you might as well go all the way and set it up with a brand new rom take it away set you've rooted your phone congratulations now comes the hard part installing a customized version of Android hi i'm seth rosenblatt prasina and today i'll show you how to install a custom android problem there's a lot of reasons you might want to run a custom rom android features at the phone company or hardware manufacture has decided won't get pushed to your device or just to get a more robust set of features you can also run customized themes on a rom you're likely to see significantly better performance basically you get more control over your phone it's all about you baby oh and i hope you know this by now but rooting your phone voids your warranty installing a custom rom pretty much obliterates it there are a few methods for downgrading your phone back to stock and though they're not simple seen at TV has how to do that to the mod we're going to be working with today is cyanogenmod which is in use on more than 100,000 android devices and is one of the most popular roms i'm going to install it on cnet editor antoine Goodwin's old droid 1 mostly because that's the first spare phone that showed up roms can be tricky things so be careful that you use what i tell you here is more of an introduction or loose guideline for how to install a custom rom definitely go look up how to install the rom of your choosing on your specific device so here's how it's done first we're going to create a backup of your system download and run a backup app like titanium backup then download the raw manager app from the market either free or paid will do tap the app and then choose flash clockworkmod recovery tap motorola droid and they give the app root permission if prompted if the app crashes just allow it to force clothes and run it again if the flash was successful you'll see a box that reads successfully flashed clockworkmod recovery clockworkmod recovery is a customized version of the android default recovery screen and it allows for more choices such as nandroid backups all right let's get to the ROM next if you've bought the premium version of wrong manager there's a slightly automated way to do this jump into the app and select download rom tap cyanogenmod after you install you can backup existing ROM and wipe data and cache when the install finishes it will reboot directly into Santa gen mod if you didn't buy the raw manager premium you can still install a rom relatively easily relatively go to cyanogenmod com and download the latest version if you use google apps like Gmail also download the Google Apps package cyanogen decided to spin off the Google sourced apps to avoid potential conflicts with Google connect your phone to your computer enable USB mode and place both the cyanogen and google apps zips in the root directory of your SD card next boot into clockworkmod recovery by turning off the phone and restarting it holding down the X key along with the power button use the d-pad to navigate choose wipe data/factory reset then wipe cache partition then install zip from sdcard select Choose zip from the SD card then go for the Santa gen mod update zip then install the Google Apps update.zip once the installation is finished go back to return to the main menu and choose reboot now your phone auto boot into cyanogenmod if it fails the first time but you can still navigate give it another shot of course if it doesn't do anything at all you've got yourself a pretty little brick and that's how you install a custom rom on android first cnet i'm seth rosenblatt so now you're all set right no problem actually rooting and installing roms can be tricky so if you decide you'd rather put it all back the way you found it look for Seth's video how to restore your rooted phone to the factory settings on cnet TV most new cars these days have these big pretty touchscreen display is right there in the center console and they're cool but they take up a lot of space luckily Pioneer has come up with a solution that is both elegant and kind of rad if you want a big screen car audio system for your vehicle but you don't have the ton of space in your dashboard you'll probably be interested in taking a look at one of these motorized AV units I'm antuan goodwin cnet com today we're taking a first look at the Pioneer AVH p 6300 BTW and this unit features a 7-inch color touchscreen that moves on a motorized arm the unit can be tilted back and forth and retracts into a single din chassis when not in use you're saving a lot of space here on installation but you want to make sure there's about an arc of six to eight inches of clearance in front of the unit so the motorized display actually has room to move physical controls include a volume knob a source button physical skip buttons and a disc eject button for the CD DVD player there's also a button to retract that touchscreen an analog auxiliary input and USB port can also be found on the front panel the latter of which supports mass storage devices and iPod connectivity there's also an SD card slot but you'd be hard-pressed to find it because it's hidden behind this removable panel both that USB port and SD card slot support audio playback and photo viewing so it may not be such a bad idea just to leave an SD card in this unit with a bunch of your favorite songs additionally there's also an input for a rear-view camera and an analog auxiliary video source Bluetooth connectivity is standard and the microphone is included but it doesn't appear that audio streaming is supported just yet now when the iphone is connected via USB pandora's Apple Inc is supported if you have the app download on your phone so you can then view and select your preset radio stations thumbs up and thumbs down songs and bookmark songs all from pioneers interface you're gonna want to check out the full review for the pioneer AVH p 6300 BTW for even more details and photos and our final thoughts about this mobile DVD receiver there's been Antoine good with cnet com giving you your first look whoo another cliffhanger I guess you'll have to go find Antoine's review to see what he really thinks but here's a hint three and a half stars alright I put it off as long as I can it's time to check out the bad the bad award this week goes to my facebook newsfeed between the top news feature and the oversharing friends that pollute your timeline making sure you're seeing the updates you want can be a little tricky luckily Sharon Vaknin is here to show you how to solve those problems and more hi I'm Sharon Vaknin for cnet.com here to give you a spring cleaning project for your Facebook account when Facebook's at top news as the default view my newsfeed became completely irrelevant according to facebook top news displays posts that get the most comments likes and shares along with post by people you interact with most but instead of letting Mark Zuckerberg decide what content is important to you here's how to customize your newsfeed first switch to the most recent view which is like a real-time view of your friends activity now it's not really a real-time view because Facebook only shows you the latest posts from people you frequently interact with to change that click most recent and head down to edit options here select show posts from all of your friends and pages now this means that every single bit of activity will show up in your newsfeed even updates from the annoying people who you didn't really miss when you were in the top news view so the next time you see an update from that person or page hover over the post and click X you can actually choose to hide just that post which is pointless or hide all updates from that person they'll never know this also works for hiding apps like farmville or Twitter click the X and choose to hide all posts by that application at this point your newsfeed is already much cleaner but there are still a couple more options to make it even better this drop-down menu gives you options to filter posts by status updates photos links and more just below those options are your friend lists if you don't see any that's because you haven't created them click account and then edit friends in the upper right is the option to create a list enter the title of the list and select the friends you want to include I have a work list a list for just my close friends and a family list now if you go to the newsfeed and select that list only updates from the people or pages you included will appear you can make as many lists as you want one creative way to use them is to put all of the news brands into one list to stay on top of current events of course the most powerful way to control your Facebook feed is to unfriend people who bother you or delete pages and apps that you don't care about Facebook needs to make some changes though I'd like to see a built-in current events filter and option to make most recent my default view it would also be nice to hide certain activities like new friendships or relationship statuses that I don't care about until then these workarounds will do for cnet com I'm Sharon Vaknin and i'll see you on the interwebs you know I noticed we blurred out the names of the people that Sharon had blocked from her feet I wonder how much it's worth to her for me to keep that information private while I come up with a ransom figure let's go ahead and check out this week's bottom line now here at Cena we see all kinds of technology but sometimes our jobs take us in unexpected directions like to toilet first looks yeah no really check it out hi I'm Scott Stein senior associate editor at cnet com and this is the Kohler Numi toilet now this may not be for everyone in fact it costs almost sixty four hundred dollars to buy but this is a high-tech toilet that borrows a lot from the idea of Japanese hi-tech toilets but gives it a distinctly American design namely there's a touchscreen on this this is a touchscreen magnetic tablet that docs over here and gives you complete control over heated seat functions and automatically adjusting the day and also temperature and blow drying options for your every comfort need there's a speaker system built into here there's a radio you can attach your iPhone yes is a full entertainment system for your commode but if you are touch a verse and you don't like using a remote this thing can be fully automatically adjusted as well it will automatically raise and lower the lid from a distance of up to six to eight feet you can also set it to automatically flush for you and it also has to flush settings one uses less water for the ecologically conscious overall it is a toilet from the future but if you've been to Japan you may have seen something like it you probably haven't seen one that has a remote quite like this I'm Scott Stein and this has been a hands-on with the Kohler Numi ultra high-tech smart toilet the bottom line this week stay classy Scott's time that was a remarkable exercise in restraint not a single bad pun in the entire piece which is a lot more than I can say about this show all right folks that is our show will be back next week with a brand spanking new cnet tech review including highlights from the 2011 new york auto show until then there are tons of great videos available every day that's seen at tv.com I'll see you next time and thank you for watching