Gadgetory

this week on the cnet tech review como sea beasts a tablet find out in our coverage for mobile world congress in barcelona get a look at the long-rumored playstation phone and a whole lot more Plus get charged up for toyota's plug-in Prius and a big TV from Vizio with just a few small problems like its picture 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 2011 Mobile World Congress kicked off this week in Barcelona and as usual our team of mobile editors received a cushy trip to Spain on the company's dime and I did not anyway in between plates of paella and flamenco dancing lessons our team did manage to get a little work done take a look at this selection of new phones headed your way and I seriously hope you didn't just buy a new verizon iphone hi I'm Kendra min senior editor at cnet com I'm here Mobile World Congress 2011 in Barcelona want to show you to sony ericsson xperia play now we know miss devices coming for a long time to bend a lot of rumors about it there been a lot of leaks and of course there was that superbowl commercial with the android with the grafted on thumbs I know that freaked a lot of people out but you understand what the why the thumbs are needed for this device but first we'll look at it from a phone point of view good cos does look like a normal smartphone it is running Gingerbread see of a bunch of you have the multiple home screens of course here on the side we have a 3.5 millimeter headset jack over here we have a micro USB port there's a volume rocker right here and then you see these two shoulder buttons I bet you know what those are for once you slide up the phone there you have those PlayStation controls now it's going to look a lot like a normal PlayStation controller so you have the directional arrows right here and in the middle you have to touch pads now instead of joysticks you couldn't really fit a joystick on a phone like this so these touch pads they will have an online store for downloading games so they have lots of titles they will add titles as they go along I was really impressed by the graphic sony ericsson does a good job with those displays dos feel pretty comfortable especially when a cradle my thumb's around the back the phone does slide up and down easy also it's pretty thin i think for its for what it offers for packing in that game controller does have a five megapixel camera has a lot of normal Android features so here it is finally the sony ericsson xperia play hey everyone I'm Banita senior editor at cnet com and we're here at Mobile World Congress 2011 in Barcelona Spain with the first look of the samsung galaxy s2 this is the next generation galaxy smartphone and some of the design features that are new has a four point two seven inch super amoled plus screen that gorgeous as usual and it's really super thin as you can see here it is running Android 2.3 along with TouchWiz four-point-oh so if Samsung's user interface is on here some of the new features of that are these four hubs appear that includes the gaming hub music readers hub and the social hub with these three new hubs here you should be able to get new gaming content as well as music and books they have redone some of the widgets so it has a Flickr interface here some of the new specs it is running and videos integrity chipset so it is a dual core processor phone it's also got an eight megapixel camera here on back along with a flash as well as a 2 megapixel camera on front for video calls so that's very nice as far as availability they're just making a global announcement today no word yet on us availability or pricing but I suspect that it probably will make its way to the US carriers sometime this year I'm Bonnie Tom this has been your first look at the samsung galaxy s2 hi I'm Kendra and senior editor at cnet com i'm here at Mobile World Congress 2011 in barcelona spain and i want to show you LG's new optimus 3d here it is finally it is built on the previous optimus 2x at optimus black that we saw at CES but it does have a very nice design as thin thin is very solid has a good feeling in the hand is a 4.3 inch display so it's really bright and colorful there are multiple screens of course so you can cycle through and get widgets the music player you can add which it's short folders shortcuts everything that you'd expect now the phone right now this particular phone is on for EO but when the phone really comes out at will run on gingerbread so that's important to note so gingerbreads really making some traction here which is nice down below you have four touch control set aside the micro USB port and the HDMI port and on the back you'll see it has two cameras now why two cameras that's for shooting 3d video this phone will actually show 3d video you don't need glasses for that kind of see the icons fly toward you so for 3d effect you know it's probably not like watching a full 3d movie of course but it is a bit of a different effect and actually something you can see I was little skeptical about 3d on the phone about how's that going to work but this actually does it in some ways in the interior menus you do have a simple icon-based design if you go to the messaging you can't see that there's a virtual keyboard so you don't have a physical keyboard with this phone so here we're going to see some 3d video like I said it might not work it might not show up well on this camera but you can't see that you're getting a little bit of an effect so I think it works pretty well actually all in all it does look pretty cool like I said a three-cheese video I was pretty skeptical about but it seems like it works well i'm kent german for mobile world congress and this is the LG optimus 3d that's a pretty big pile of buyers regret no of course there's a lot more going on at the Mobile World Congress then phones as scores of new tablets flood the market place Bonnie cha had her hands full with these new models hey everyone I'm Bonnie toss senior editor at cnet com and we're here in Barcelona Spain for mobile or Congress and we've got a special first book here of the samsung galaxy tab this is their second tablet and it's going to exist along with the 7-inch galaxy tab but as you can see this one has a 10.1 inch display here really gorgeous it's one of the thinnest and lightest 10-inch tablets available it's 11 millimeters thin and weighs about 21 ounces so very nice here on the back they've also added a texture here so it's not as slick as the first galaxy tab which is nice also got these little indentations so it fits nicely with the hand feature wise it's running Android Honeycomb and it's a google experience device so that means no custom UI no touch was on here which i'm sure some of you will be very happy to hear got a 2 megapixel camera on the front for video calls as well as an 8 megapixel camera on back and it does 1080p HD video recording it also has a dual core processor it's using Nvidia's Tegra 2 chipset so you should see faster performance as well as browsing on and other benefits it is an hspa+ device they're only announcing the global announcement here at Mobile World Congress we do know Vodafone will be one of the carriers to offer it no word yet on us availability or carrier support but hopefully that'll be something that will be added into the future because it looks like a very cool device i'm bonnie chen this has been your first look at the samsung galaxy tab hey everyone I'm Banita senior editor at cnet com here in mobile world congress in barcelona spain and we've got your first look at the tmobile d slate which is actually announced at CES 2011 but we didn't get a chance to look at but now we do and it is a gorgeous piece of hardware it's got a 9 inch screen the resolution is 1280 by 768 really gorgeous and very responsive here as you can see it's pretty thin what's special about this device is it has a 3d camcorder so you can shoot 3d videos and then watch them on the Jeep late but it will require 3d glasses this is a honeycomb tablet so it's running Android OS 3.0 it will be a 4g device and t-mobile will preload this tablet with some other extras to kind of differentiate it from the other tablets out there another feature that that display has is a camera on front so you can make video calls and it also has movable here so as you can see you can actually turn the pages like an actual look this is just one of the many tablets coming out this year but one of one I'm actually very impressed by especially with the hardware in the 3d camcorder no availability date yet but it will be with t-mobile and again it'll be a 4g device only have one model 32 gigabytes just to make it simple for everyone but hopefully we'll get that you for viewing it soon and get a full review up for you I'm Banita and this has been your first look at the tmobile geez lis hey everyone I'm Bonnie cha senior editor at cnet com and we're here at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Spain where HTC Justin veiled their first tablet the HTC Flyer we've got Nathan here from HTC who's going to give us a quick rundown of the features so this is flyer on the front of here you can see we've got a front-facing 1.3 megapixel camera I flip it around we've also see we've got 5 megapixel camera on the back and I aluminium unibody design 3.5 mil Jack for your headphones and then just at the bottom here we've got our connector for hdmi and charging all in one so keep the body nice and slim here i'm going to show you updated sense user experience it's just very quickly i can shave but tip the screen even though widgets animating 3d they really come out of the screen and it really comes to life using our notes application so when I'm creating a new note you can see that I can actually associate the note to a particular calendar appointment and then anything that I record or take down will be associated with that kind of invite so i can record and then i can write on the screen and you can see down here that i have this little peanut and its in green that means i can interface with that and here i can change the color i can change the style of the pen and i can change the size I can draw on the screen here using a fountain pen style it's up on the screen and I can type some text you can also capture an image then this is where the buttons on the pen coming to place are using our squad technology i can press and hold this top button here and i can start to raise what I've written the bottom one here at press and hold and I can actually select text within the note itself once I'm happy to stop recording and then this will automatically upload to the web so I can refer to it a later date they can even go into my calendar find that it will be attached to the calendar event itself so when can we expect the HTC Flyer to hit the streets the fly is going to be hitting the markets in q2 this year will that include the US I can tell you right now alright well it looks like a very cool tablet we're excited to look at it again that's the HTC Flyer Thank You Nathan and I'm Banita and this has been your first look at the HTC Flyer thanks Nathan I mean Bonnie I suppose with all the work she's been doing this week it is fair to let someone else take over for a while now while the attendees in Barcelona got to see some actual new products this week here at home some people were preoccupied by speculation about new ipad models and this week's apple byte brian Tong takes a look at what we could be seeing not only the ipad 2 but in the ipad 3 plus a little something for his lucky Valentine's what's up I'm Brian song and welcome to the apple pie for all the good and bad inside the world of Apple I guess you could call this our Valentine's Day edition because love is in the air or not now let's get to the show we've talked about the ipad 2 being spotted in the wild last week and the Wall Street Journal is reporting a lot of what we covered they say the new iPad is in production with a thinner and lighter design at least one camera that's front facing the resolution will be the same 1024 x 768 with more memory and a more powerful graphics processor but guess what that might not be the only ipad release this year seek a birdie in a rumor that's picking up more and more steam the daring fireball blog says that HP's recently announced touch pad set to come out this summer which looks great might I add might bump up against the release of wait for it the ipad 3 then TechCrunch said their sources claim there will be a fall surprise and it's related to the ipad 3 now I've checked with my own specific Apple component suppliers who said based on their knowledge hitting that time frame would be very very tight and they don't see it happening but ipad 3 talk before the ipad 2 has even been released yeah it's getting that bad now this might bring a smile to Apple TV owners and GAD reports at the latest iOS 4.3 beta hints at the apple TV supporting online gaming there's references to a TV games and a TV Thunder that show a connection of controller and some sort of game standings we all have been waiting for apps on the platform and this could indicate something is happening in the near future all right let's take a break with our iPhone app of the week this week's appt is the Google Translate app for the iphone it's free and it accepts voice inputs for 15 languages why don't you play with my pet dragon and then translate your word or phrase into one of more than 50 languages you can also listen to your translations spoken out loud in one of 23 languages but I'm more concerned if it translates the universal language of love hey Jamie check this out anata Garcia rare oop what is she no bara teen wow those Japanese I'm Chinese and I speak English no no it's all good baby you know I just thought you want a little asian pursue you sit oh yeah steer work thing it's all good see you guys works like a charm now we've got a bonus app of the week for you and it's called the sex personal trainer appt it measures your length strength and intensity I did a demo of my own so let's just roll the tape Oh wanna roll the tape what do you mean not you're supposed to roll the tape do your job dude I do no no no roll roll the tape roll the tape ring a seconds long yeah no we don't we don't want to show that okay and finally you guys show us a lot of love so we've got to give it right back big props to our apple byte buddies Edward Caleb Stephen and Derek from the association of computing machinery at UC Riverside and Kelsey if you're still watching Caleb still loves you in that melts my heart like sweet marshmallows alright that's going to do it for this week's show send us your emails to the apple byte at cnet com i'm brian Tong thanks for watching we'll see you guys next week for another bite of the Apple all he's not just a tech expert he's a matchmaker too so cute while we wait to hear how things work out between Kelsey and Caleb let's take a quick break but we'll be right back with more tech review right after this welcome back to the cnet tech review our weekly video digest of all things good and bad we've seen here at cnet TV continuing on in the good there's kind of nothing good about taxis than I guess unless it's you being totally organized and managing your finances on the go like a tax ninja enter mints calm for mobile welcome to tap that app I'm jasmine France and this is a show where we cover the hottest apps in the mobile space I know financial software isn't exactly the most titillating subject but with the tax season fast approaching this week's show is the perfect opportunity to get you all thinking about money so we're going to take a closer look at my favorite app for handling all sorts of financial needs it's called mint and it's available for both the iphone and android devices like many of my favorite apps mint also offers an online component which you can access at mint com that means you could take advantage of this service from any mobile device with web capability and multi-platform compatibility is always a big plus in my book especially when it comes to financial software let's talk about what the mint app can do for you of course the basic premise is that it lets you access your financial info on the go and I mean all of it so that means if you have a checking account of make of America savings at ING and auto loan at your local credit union and a 401 K with smith barney you can get an at-a-glance overview of each and every one just by firing up mint and logging in further mint presents your overall cash flow in one nicely laid out screen by compiling your income debt and investments on the back end so you can easily view your financial health that will also break down exactly what types of expenses you're incurring and then let you monitor and set budgets for each type oh and for those of you who prefer apps with some visual flair you'll be happy to note that everything in mint is color-coded which aside from being nice to look at also makes it easy to quickly grasp items like your budget and the type of transaction on the screen in front of you finally it's worth mentioning that mint recently teamed up with TurboTax to simplify deduction recording and maximize your refund and while attempting to file taxes entirely from a mobile device is far too tedious to consider we certainly appreciate meant for helping us get our finances organized ahead of time that's it for this week's show if you have any suggestions then to tap that app at cnet com I'm jasmine France and we'll see you next week right I'm just saying how bad can budgeting be if it's color-coded okay it's about that time let's see what we have going on this week in the bad besides the lack of material available in 3d these days one of the big reasons people are shying away from 3d TVs is those clunky heavy expensive glasses and yes Vizio tackles that problem with this new 65 inch LED TV but how do they explain some of the other problems with this set hi there I'm David Katz meijer from cnet I'm sitting next two videos 65-inch xvt 3d 650 sv this monster is the first 3d TV to ship the United States to feature passive 3d TV technology we'll get to that in a little bit but first I want to note that this is the only model of its kind right now Vizio only makes this as a 65 inch size a little bit later in the year there's going to be a lot of other smaller videos that use passive 3d but for now this guy is it so as I mentioned it has passive 3d it actually comes with four pairs of these passive 3d glasses it's between passive and active 3d is that the glasses are a lot cheaper and they don't have any sort of electronics inside them so these passive glasses look a lot just like standard sunglasses and of course they fit over a standard pair of glasses so the same kind you can find in most theaters that use 3d TV technology in the US the active glasses on the other hand are a lot more expensive and you got to buy of course a pair for each family member so it can add up the design of the Vizio is relatively generic it's got this glossy black around the edge you look at it from the side you can tell us an led-based LCD TV it's only about 2.2 inches thin which makes it pretty light a good thing on a TV this big vizio apps platform on this TV offers Netflix Amazon video on demand and voodoo the latter actually has 3d TV streaming so you can actually rent some 3d videos of course the selection right now is pretty slim there's also a good selection of audio streaming apps including Rhapsody radio time and Pandora so all told the streaming app selection with stevie is very good there's also a few non screaming apps including Facebook and a new app from fan that allows you to go on and I choose movie screening times in your area so we kind of like that little addition one of the nice things about vizio zaps platforms it's well integrated it even includes a TV settings app that has all the options for adjusting this set not as many options is found on a many other high-end TVs and the 3d options are particularly slim but at least it's all nicely integrated in the main menu around back because of the slim TV the input Bay looks kind of squashed it does have five HDMI however in addition to a pc input and a component video input the analog selection is pretty sparse but at least there's plenty of digital inputs another standout feature on the Vizio is its well-equipped remote control you can slide it open to reveal a full qwerty keyboard that allows you to interact with apps like Facebook and Twitter a lot easier than using a virtual keyboard on your TV screen mode is a little bit chunkier however and a little bit less responsive than most smartphone keyboards so keep that in mind we also like the derailleur has bluetooth capabilities so you can operate it without having line of sight to the television picture quality video is actually a little bit disappointing in 2d mode we noticed it had relatively light black levels the picture uniformity wasn't that great we blame that on the edge LED backlighting TV also has an artifact that looks a little bit like smearing when there's fast motion for example in faces they can tend to blur a little bit more than a lot of the other LCD TVs we've seen and that's actually little surprising given us one hundred twenty Hertz model this big TV also has a relatively glossy screen so it does catch a lot of ambient light in bright rooms on the flip side we did appreciate that the Vizio had actually accurate color but that really doesn't offset all the other picture quality issues we saw in 2d one of the downsides of the Vizio is 3d performance is that it has half the resolution of active 3d that means that when you're looking at 3d on this set it does appear a little bit softer than we're used to on active 3d models there's also a few more artifacts for example there's some jagged edges on diagonal lines that showed up on the passive TV and not on the active models on the flip side the Vizio was a little bit brighter overall than the active TVs of course if you have a relatively controlled viewing environment that's not a big deal that if you're viewing in a bright room the active brighter 3d image might be a nice thing in terms of comfort we did appreciate the videos lighter glasses but we didn't really see any difference in terms of headaches or that sort of thing induced by the act of TV versus the passive and generally feel like headaches and those sorts of viewer comfort more results of the content not the implementation of 3d but we'll keep looking and of course passive does offer a nice alternative to active if you're really not a fan of those expensive glasses and still want 3d that's a quick look at the Vizio xvt 3d 650 sv and i'm david katz mark will boys still make passes at girls with passive glasses trust me it doesn't matter how good the 3d looks or how light the glasses are if the 2d picture looks cruddy back to the drawing board vizio alright let's go ahead and check out this week's bottom line now as if the Prius didn't already own the market among the super green crowd they're now doing an electric version but not the scary kind that runs out of juice the very reassuring kind that also uses gas here's coolly to break it all down look the Prius still dominates the hybrid business trouncing the insight in the fusion which are the nearest things to a serious runner-up but in the battle for forward mind share the Prius has slipped let's see if the upcoming prius plug-in can recapture the old cachet and check the tech giving the Prius PR hell these days are the Nissan Leaf electric the Chevy Volt range extender and a smattering of other hybrids like the excellent sonata and fusion hybrid toyota in its infinite conservativism chooses to answer revolution with evolution a prius you plug in to go a little farther on electric power and inside a prius plug-in you're going to feel pretty familiar driven a prius this is not dramatically be done inside this is based on a third gen prius you push the button here to wake things up and with that in mind you're going to get this big eyebrow dashboard that wakes up let's take a tour from left to right first of all see that light on the left that means I'm in EV mode just to the right of that is my gas gauge then you've got your speedometer you've got an instantaneous MPG gauge your gear indicator next to that will get to the gear indicator in a minute and then comes the good stuff the main display for the hybrid drive system for hybrid synergy drive you've got several modes this is the one that i think is the most useful the hybrid system indicator overall that battery indicator shows i've got almost a full battery then I've got this sort of bar that goes left to right the EV icon you see right now says I'm running an EV mode when you see the small little ramp on the left lit up that's when I'm regenerating power into the battery when you see the little bar on the far right lit up that's when I'm tapping power strongly out of the electric motor and anything in the middle is a blend of electric and gas here's your shifter pulling it over here and back get you into drive pull it over here and back after that gets you into be v is a high regeneration drive it has a lot more drag or D cell where it's really engaging the electric motor in generator mode more often now of course you've got to energy doors on this car here's the one with electricity goes the one down yonders for gasoline when you open that up you get the standard sae power port that's that multi-pin guy right in there in there goes what is now becoming a very common and off scene charging handle on electric or million vehicles that goes there the other end of this cable has part of the charging apparatus on it this brick right here which you would probably typically hang on a wall if you had one sitting at home nothing much happens here this light lights up then it moderates with the cars internal charging rig the pulsing of electricity to charge the batteries let's go look at those now back here here is where the batteries live the additional batteries in this guy are the story this whole panel here conceals a large number of them either lithium-ion by the way which your current Prius doesn't have it's still running nickel metal hydride technology lithium-ion is the new stuff better energy density a lighter i believe and can be shaped and packaged better what's in this car actually are three batteries too that will do electric only drive two really big ones and a third one it's only used to be hybridized with the gas engines and they compartmentalized this to manage and keep charge available for different modes at all times I don't think it's Toyota's plan but the more I drove this car the more I thought it should clear the decks and replace the hybrid prius not be a somewhat different flavor of it you see this and the standard hybrid prius look real different on paper but in everyday use they felt that they might start to split hairs okay pricing and availability little early this guy is not going to hit showrooms until q2 of 2012 little more than a year from our shoot today and even then only in the green 14 the states where you'd expect hybrids to sell a year later you get the 50 state roll out of this vehicle pricing also a guess three to five thousand dollars more is kind of the speculation over the price of a standard prius hybrid today but that could change a lot with lithium-ion battery development that will happen in the next year now if you see one of these today it's because it's part of a fleet of just 150 that are currently in testing here in the US going forward a the biggest challenge of this vehicle is the segmentation of the electric car market there's an awful lot for consumers to digest here and fitting this particular one into that array i think is a bit of a chore toyota and other automakers have their work cut out for them the bottom line this week that car is kind of confusing I mean I'm sure once you're driving it it'll all just seem normal but like be mode really is this what the future looks like the car doesn't even fly and that's it for this week everyone but don't fret we'll be back next week with a brand new cnet tech review and until then there are tons of great videos available every day at cnet TV com see you next time and thank you for watching