Gadgetory

this week on the CNET tech review hop inside an electric rolls-royce at the Geneva Auto Show lovable lizards get animated in il M's new Rango two sets of speakers that you're better off without oh and some stuff about a new iPad or something like that 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 some unique tech wisdom in the form of the bottom line let's get started with the good this week in San Francisco Steve Jobs though Who am I kidding you're just here to see the iPad 2 here's Donald Bell's first look hey i'm donald bell for cnet.com we're here at Apple's iPad 2 launch event and I'm holding the iPad 2 in fact I'm holding the white version of the iPad 2 there's now two colors a white version and a black version all the same prices all the same capacities as last year's but you're now getting much thinner design a lighter design and also getting a faster processors there's there's a dual-core a5 processor in here it's promising nine times the graphics performance of the original iPad you're also getting a few new features you're getting a FaceTime feature for video calling you get HD cameras on the back and a VGA camera on the front Apple is also announcing two new applications for the iPad their own applications ones iMovie for the iPad which was available before on the iPhone and the iPod Touch it's now coming through the iPad is the most sophisticated version or at least the most sophisticated mobile version of iMovie we've seen yet the other application the Apple announced today for the iPad is GarageBand this is going to be a pretty cool application out there for you musical types does multitrack recording virtual instruments a lot of fun we're gonna see this thing March 11th so having played on off the iPad 2 the little bit that I've had to hear I have to say the thing I like about it the most is how thin and light apples be able to get the design having seen a lot of their competitors this past year I haven't seen anything that's gotten this small and I think be able to preserve that 10 hour battery life is a big deal it's gonna be hard to be able to keep up with that so for cnet.com I'm Donnell Bella showing off the Apple iPad 2 I think everyone was a bit surprised to see Steve Jobs take the stage for the iPad 2 announcements but he did turn the spotlight over to some other members of the Apple team to demo some of the tablets key apps take a look at FaceTime iMovie and GarageBand all optimized for iPad 2 FaceTime is the best and easiest way to videoconference we supported on the iPhone and we supported on the iPod Touch and now we're bringing it to the iPad you can FaceTime between two iPads between an iPad and an iPhone or an iPod Touch and between an iPad and a Mac let me go ahead and just give you a demo so it's calling him in a second he'll answer how you doing doing great Scott how's it going oh that's going great I was just giving everyone here a demo of FaceTime you can see already that the size of the iPad is just ideal for video conference and the person's face is a great size you can see all their expressions it feels very personal you can also use both the front camera and the rear camera so Michael why don't you flip to the rear camera and show us what you're looking at sure thanks guy okay Michael's been locked in a tree they very sad cafe you can also move the the pip around to get it out of the way so it's sort of pong you can move it wherever you want but FaceTime on this really is a great experience and we can't wait for Phil to get their hands on it and of course from day one you can FaceTime from your iPad too with all the iPhone 4 customers out there thanks a lot Michael so there's two apps we're introducing today and the first one is iMovie for iPad and we have a long history of video editing we are the largest supplier of video editing software in the world we think and iMovie for iPad is in that tradition it's got a precision editor on it multitrack audio recording this is not a toy you can really edit movies on this thing it's got new themes you can airplay your video right to Apple TV from the application you can share your videos in HD with some really popular sites and it's a universal app so it will also run in the iPhone when we start up the app you can see our really nice new home screen with the old-time theater really gorgeous display here you can see each of your projects has its own little poster there's a thumbnail of the movie and the poster is based on the theme that's in the project you can just scroll back and forth between these works great and portrait it also works really nicely in landscape and this looks really great on the Retina display of the iPhone 4 and the iPod Touch as well let's go ahead and do a little bit of editing so I'm going to scroll down here now I can actually use there's a camera button on the right that I can use to they use the camera of the iPad 2 to record directly in the timeline or I can go for my video bin now I can just press and hold on a clip and I can skim my finger back and forth to take a look at the video before it's been placed into the timeline or I can just tap on a clip and then I get two handles so I can actually choose the segment of the video that I want to put in and we have two different Clips here I'll put in a piece of that one select the second clip another shot of that the girl going in the water so we'll kind of a corresponding position there tap that drops into the timeline and we've got a cross dissolve between if we want to do a more precise edit for the iPad - we have a precision editor so I can do a reverse pinch apart bring up the precision editor and now I can see all the content of the clip on the left before and after the Edit and all the content for the clip on the right I also have full control over the transition I can double tap and we can set that to none so that'll make a cut I can press and hold on the top dot and that allows me to choose the point within that video where we want to end so we'll pick a spot kind of where she goes out over the water then I can press and hold on the lower dot and do the same thing so we can make this kind of look like just a cut in the same shot I can press and hold on the center dot as well and I can roll the edit I can add and subtract frames from both sides simultaneously when I want to take a look we just back up a little bit and hit play really easy to keep going and adjust your edits to get things just the way that you want and with a pinch we close it up Raj ban for iPad is remarkable it's got touch instruments you can plug in a guitar and play real instruments if you want but it's got touch instruments that I think are gonna be a huge hit with our users guitar amps and effects 8-track recording and mixing over 250 loops you can add to your songs you can email files around of your song to anybody and it's compatible with the Mac version so if you want to start something on your iPad and finish it on the Mac no problem a launch GarageBand and the first thing you see is an instrument browser so these are all the touch instrument Steve just mentioned and you can just swipe to tap through them and it's incredible they turn the iPad itself you know musical instrument that you can play wherever you go now go ahead and bring up a keyboard to start showing this off and you can see this beautiful grand piano comes up and it fills the display and the keyboards not just a grand piano I can tap on that icon right in the middle there and you can see all the sounds that are built in there are organs electric piano clavinet look at this a whole bunch of great synthesizers that are really really fun to play well iPad has an accelerometer built in and we use that to measure the force that my finger strikes the display so garage man knows if I tap something really soft or really hard and we use that throughout the app and that lates lets us create these instruments that are incredibly expressive and and fun to play a lot of these smart instruments have this auto play dial and I can just go ahead and dial up a pattern the strings fade away now I have these big bars so the only decision I make is which chord do I want to play and look what happens with one touch of a finger when I tap on one of these chords let's choose any chord that cool so that's just a quick look at GarageBand for iPad it turns your iPad into a complete recording studio and a collection of these incredible touch instruments and we just can't wait to hear all the creative things that people are gonna do once they get this in their hands Thank You GarageBand for iPad $4.99 editing videos and composing music on the iPad pretty cool hello I guess I can't help thinking it would be a little easier if the screen was bigger although be sure to come back next week when the iPad 2 goes on sale and Donald will have an in-depth review meanwhile over in Switzerland the 2011 Geneva Auto Show open this week and Bryan coolly was on hand to peruse the new production models and concept cars there were plenty of plugins and hybrids on the show floor but not necessarily where you'd expect to find them check out these highlights yeah it's far from the biggest outie but it's got a lot of good stuff in it this is the new Audi a3 concept being rolled out just now here at Geneva not that far out there so I get excited about concepts like this because they might actually make it to showrooms more or less intact so let's see what's going on I'm not gonna bore you with all the damn design speak about harmonious fluid lines and fenders that hint at the power that lies between them which sounds kind of obscene anyway but there is a two and a half liter turbocharged gas direct injection engine 408 horsepower 368 foot-pounds of torque gets hip 216 about 4 seconds and a tiny fraction while doing 28 miles per gallon so although that's kind of great but what's inside the cabin is a whole lot more interesting inside there's a revised version of audi's MMI and includes the touchpad that is currently only found on the a8 there's an 8 inch LCD that pops up ultra-thin out of the middle of the dash built-in wireless broadband is envisioned to bring Google services into the car on screen or screens as well as creating a Wi-Fi hotspot for the passengers iPad holders in the rear of the front headrests and check out these speakers on the rear deck these things pop up a few millimeters when you power up the system just to say I'm cool this is the FM the Ferrari FF it stands for for passenger four-wheel drive and they don't even have a letter for what's about to approach you right there in the rear end that my friends is a hatchback this is what they call a Shooting Brake a station wagon in Euro terms now this vehicle is gonna slot in to replace the 612 Scaglietti which is their current high in two plus two biggest Ferrari engine ever in a production car 6.3 liter v12 651 horsepower 504 foot-pounds of torque typically drives the rear wheels primarily that's why we have this enormous trans axle back here at times when it wants to apply power to the front for better performance better handling you've got this sort of two-speed Haldex gearbox underneath the front of the drive sump on this guy that allows this car to a torque vectoring method when it detects slip this stuff kicks in it applies power to the front if it doesn't it remains a rear-wheel drive car in the sporting tradition this is rather a nice place to do business wouldn't you say we've got an actual mechanical or analog tech notice on the right side I've got a split screen of two cameras here's our Ferrari head unit this can be a 1200 watt system with gobs of surround sound speakers I don't need to convince you that it sounds good oh just see in the back fitted luggage is available as well including two full sets of golf clubs and some nice-looking releases now pricing and availability is not yet set on the FF although I see some potential customers milling around uh that looks like Nick Mason and Pink Floyd over there so they'll get the regulars in first these may not be in ready supply of her quietly well you know when you see the Spirit of Ecstasy illuminated an electric blue some things happening at Rolls Royce the something is the electrification of the phantom this is an experimental phantom the 102 E X an experimental platform to make one of these guys all battery-powered the engine came out that was the 6.7 liter v12 and in goes 96 batteries of a very sort of complex chemistry nickel cobalt manganese I've not actually heard of that before that gives you 270 kilowatts of power it's about 360 horsepower but 590 potential foot-pounds of torque 0-60 can happen about eight seconds that's slower by over two seconds than a gas engine phantom but still not a slouch the power goes out down to the back where the electric motors live and they split it up to the rear wheels only via a differential almost a quaint traditional set up range of this guy about a hundred and twenty miles they say they hope they will figure out because this is a testbed for use throughout the year ahead oh by the way charging time on this despite the massive number of batteries in here they say would be industry standard about eight hours for a full charge on a 223 phase circuit now inside I had a bourbon I'd get my mail forwarded here where was I oh yeah inside we've got some more indications this is a very different vehicle here is a charge state indicator echoing the lights that are over there at the charging port oh by the way if this little Smuggler's bin of key little tech switches is not enough for you you'll love this one there's a traditional analog clock there's the very non traditional LCD display and that is by the way specific to the electric version of this car torquey emissions free avant-garde technology although that's great but what really intrigues me is that these cars are already as quiet as the day after you died and that's where the v12 barnburner up in front imagine what it would be like with a virtually silent electric powertrain you just want to curl up in these are not for sale like I'm interest is a one-off electric prototype but they're gonna be testing it and testing it hard through 2011 who knows there may be a real one one nation look if you didn't have one of these yourself you know somebody who did the VW Rabbit slash golf Cabrio this thing sold like mad from 79 to 2002 then it got bumped off the stage by its two drop-top siblings the New Beetle convertible and the EOS drop-top but now it's back although not yet for the US this guy's going to offer a choice of six power plants in Europe one of them is a 1.6 liter turbo diesel that delivers 53 miles per gallon and no hybrid isset II involved the top is interesting it's a ragtop in the true sense not a retractable that keeps the price down but as you can see when it's down it almost violates the definition of a Cabriolet which normally infers a convertible that leaves its top apparatus kind of untidily piled back here but this is almost flush with the belt lines another big question when this is down what happens to the trunk we've seen some cars lately had seen that car tech that are a joke when the top is down let's find out tilt the logo handle not bad look at that it's almost like magic and yes there is a lowered ceiling on the trunk all the time but that makes room for the top to go down and not change your volume back here which is kind of good I'd rather have a little less room all the time then nasty surprises when the tops down some of the time now again this cars not slotted for us distribution just yet I'm not going to quote prices in Europe because it doesn't equate that way on a simple currency conversion but we'll see if they can bring this to the US and maybe send the Aeons happy well if the golf does make it to the US a whole new generation of high school girls can look forward to some sweet gifts for their 16th birthday all right the time has come for us to take a break but we will be right back with more tech review right after this welcome back to the sina tech review our weekly video digest of all things good and bad we've seen here at CNET TV continuing on in the good it's time to go to the movies or more accurately it's time to go behind the scenes of the movies Daniel Tournament got a chance to talk to some of the folks behind ILM s new animated feature Rango starring Johnny Depp or starring his voice anyway you ain't from around here are you um I'm still working on it so hi I'm Daniel tournament from CNET news and this is Rango from director Gore Verbinski it's also the first animated feature that Industrial Light and Magic has worked on after more than 30 years of live-action movies last week we got a chance to visit ILM and talk to a visual effects supervisor and one of the lead animators on the movie about what it's like to treat an animated feature like a live-action movie well early on we realized that we didn't know how to make an animated feature so we actually reached out to the community and had people come in and talk to us and tell us about how to make an animated feature and really early on I realized that we were actually breaking a lot of a lot of the rules of how animated features are being made and that we weren't actually making your standard animated feature so in the end it actually really came to be that we were kind of making a live-action movie so a lot of what our backgrounds were coming from a live-action background really helped out and really actually became a benefit and a strength for us rather than being maybe a detriment that some people thought it might be so we had really great art work two-dimensional artwork from from crash is the production designer for each character but the problem with that is that you don't know what the character looks like from all angles so we would make in the computer what we call them a cat which allows us to actually look at the character from all different angles so that we could check the proportions and and check to see you know how they're gonna look from the back or from the side so our modelers would spend about three days making this maquette and this was kind of a new process for us at ILM we really done this before but we found out that it actually really actually made the process faster for us because we could get a buy off on the proportions of what the characters gonna look like before we did all the really hard work of adding hair and dirt and grime and things like that he wanted this film to be gritty dirty and sweaty he wanted to be able to smell the wrath of the characters so we looked at we looked at life as we always do at ILM and for some clues this gave us some interesting textures and markings and you know it seemed like that is that is rangos eye the eyes were wild you know these their flick in different directions and they can even cave in which we didn't go nearly that crazy with them on the anime feature versus a live-action film we were we were way more overall it was a really really rewarding and artistic process it was great it was like a little theatre troupe full of talented actors running around acting like cartoons and it was definitely a joy to watch and extremely informative for for animation as long as that sign says Sheriff you can believe that there's law and order in this town they shot the movie like they were making a like they were making a movie no different except less locations and and the props weren't quite as fancy returns on neighbor pretty soon we're eating our children dogs and cats are getting together to create all sorts of unnatural mutant aberrations I am totally going to see that movie and I might even take my kid all right enough frivolity it's time to get serious and check out the bad whether it's playing games on your laptop or watching movies on your big screen having to settle for crummy audio can really put a damper on your experience all the more reason to steer clear of these two speaker options hey I'm just a new associate editor at C net with a review of the razor ferrets gaming speakers for 60 bucks these USB rechargeable speakers are marketed as gaming specific but there's really nothing about them that specifically benefits gaming audio that said their audio quality is more on par with USB speakers and you can get much more features and better amplification out of the creative d100 bluetooth boombox that ones reviewed on CNET as well it's $20 more but you'll be more satisfied with the sound quality now the hardware consists of these two satellite speakers joined by a nylon cable that features a USB charging plug on one side and a 3.5 millimeter audio jack on the other if you push the top of each dome the speakers expand to reveal a mesh chamber where the sound comes out so you can use the jack to play music out of any device with a standard headphone port like an iphone or ipad but the d100 by creative has a more elegant wireless bluetooth solution so you don't have to carry around this clumsy cord with you and razer makes the claim that that chamber is actually strengthened the base and resonance of your music but we tested the volume levels and are disappointed with the audio fidelity we played several songs across a variety of genres through the ferric speakers and we noticed lots of bass and treble distortions even at low volumes like we said before your dollar will go much further with a slightly more expensive audio solution like the creative bluetooth d100 speakers so you should definitely check those out if you're in the market you can read all the details in our full review on CNET but that's going to do it for me I'm Justin new these are the Razer ferrets mobile gaming speakers and that sounds good hi I'm Matthew Muscovy AK from cnet.com and we're gonna take a look at the onkyo htx 22 HDX this is a 2.1 home theater system and it's currently selling online for about 250 dollars now akio is known for having big boxy speakers but this is really more of a lifestyle system there are just too small speakers and the subwoofer which also has an AV receiver built-in the subwoofer has a glossy front panel with an LCD display and there also a few controls on the top such as volume control and input selection for when the remote goes missing now around back you'll see all the inputs the most important are the three HDMI inputs which will cover most of your home theater gadgets and there are also free digital audio inputs and two analog inputs for all your extra AV devices you also notice that there are extra speaker jacks on the back and you can buy an additional speaker package from Onkyo to upgrade the system to a full 5.1 home theater system now the big missing feature for us is an easy way to connect an iPod we would have liked either a front panel mini Jack input or even better a built-in iPod dock which we've seen on a lot of other systems now for a home theater system sound quality is the most important feature and here the akio was a little disappointing when we listened to say action scenes in movies the onkyo just didn't sound powerful enough to fill up our medium size testing room music didn't fare much better either and we could really hear the limitations of the smaller speakers included with the system so in all the onkyo HDX 22 HDX is a nice looking system and has a strong feature set for the price but its sound quality really didn't impress us and it's much better suited to smaller rooms I'm Matthew moscovia and this is the onkyo HT X 22 HDS tough week for the audio guys in New York I guess hopefully something better will come across their desk soon all right let's go ahead and check out this week's bottom line so back to the iPad 2 yes it's faster it's more powerful it comes in black and white and so on and so on but the real question on everyone's mind was what about that mind blowing case seriously miss it the first time here you go it's one of my favorite little videos it actually kind of reminds me of a Pixar short or something like that but as you see we actually built magnets right into the iPad itself and then there's magnets in the hinge for the smart cover and it not only holds the cover on but it auto aligns it it's really cool and of course what would these cases be if they didn't come in colors so we've got five polyurethane colors and five colors of leather and they're really really beautiful they look great with the black unit they look great with the white unit the polyurethane cases are $39 the leather cases are $69 and we think this is going to we think people are gonna love these cases the bottom line this week doesn't anyone at Apple have kids the Smart Cover is pretty slick but how's it supposed to help if your four-year-old drops your new iPad to while he's watching the Cars movie for the 350 third time hypothetically also I can't wait until we start hearing reports about bus passes and credit cards getting all messed up because of the magnets my suggestion keep it out of your purse all right that's our show for this time everyone but we'll be back next week with a brand new scene at tech review and until then there are tons of great videos available every day at CNN tv.com I'll see you next time and thank you for watching