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Apple In The News  
Apple, Mac, & iPhone News...

January 11th, 2010

Good Morning!

CES is over and done with folks, and it's time for the highlights! We've got some smartphone news as well, and even though the DROID, Eris and Nexus One have garnered serious attention following their releases, it seems the iPhone is still the leader in capacative touch and overall awesomeness.

3D TV, Mobile Hotspots, e-Readers
Yup, most of the buzz from CES centered on these three categories. Quite a few TV makers revealed 3D TVs with Panasonic and Sony leading the pack, but with the initial release of technology comes a super high cost--add up the price of the TV, the Blu-ray player and the movie and we can only imagine you'l be looking at the equivalent of a couple month's rent.

And do you really want to buy into this tech when 3D glasses are still in the infancy of their design? We sure don't. It'll be really cool to see how this develops, especially how quickly other companies release TVs with the technology and if that will affect price...or if 3D is really a premium technology with a price tag to match.

The new Sprint Overdrive Mobile Hotspot is the first to offer dual technology by allowing you to connect to either Sprint's 3G or Clearwire's 4G network. The 4G is only in 27 cities as of now, but with the promise of 80 by 2011 the draw is clear. At $100 this little guy won't break the bank and the wireless plan will set you back $60 a month...but think of all the money you'll save on Starbucks once you can go anywhere to work on your laptop!

New e-Readers debuted by the dozens this year--well, almost. There have been major advances in displays and interfaces since the Kindle came out and the Spring Design's Alex reader (with Android based LCD and the ability to flow web content onto the reader) and the Plastic Logic QuE (with capacative touch and links to Barnes and Noble's e-book store) took the cake as far as ease of use and features. However, they still come at a hefty price (from $349-$799) and we think that's just too much to trade for the convenience of leaving a two pound book out of your bag. And we read. A lot.

Smartphone Fever
MOTO labs recently released results from a study on smartphone capacative touch screens, and (drumroll please) the iPhone took top honors. Tested on accuracy and sensitivity the HTC Droid Eris, Google's Nexus One, Motorola Droid and the iPhone were graded on component quality, design and software integration by drawing straight lines with a drawing app. The iPhone's lines? Straight and unbroken. The other guys? Not so much.

Here's why:

"On inferior touchscreens, it's basically impossible to draw straight lines. Instead, the lines look jagged or zig-zag, no matter how slowly you go, because the sensor size is too big, the touch-sampling rate is too low, and/or the algorithms that convert gestures into images are too non-linear to faithfully represent user inputs."

There you go. Expert opinion: the iPhone still rules.

A Tidbit for You
And we hear the next generation iPhone will be adding a LED flash to its camera, which is rumored to be getting boosted to 5 megapixels. Bout time.

Glad to hear it? Tell us on Twitter.

Till tomorrow, Newsies...

 

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