Hi, I'm Molly Wood, and welcome to the Buzz Report, the show about the tech news
that e eryone's talking about.
This week, a big Apple event!
That's always big news,
but the HUGE news is that Steve Jobs himself appeared on stage in San Francisco to
deliver the iPad 2.
As you know, he's on indefinite medical leave from Apple, and just a few weeks ago,
there were some very worrying videos of him apparently leaving a cancer treatment
center looking extremely thin and unsteady.
He missed the Apple shareholders'
meeting, and we'd all settled in to the idea that, you know, he's out.
He's at home.
In
bed.
Tim Cook is our guy.
But there was Steve on Wednesday, up on stage and getting a wild standing ovation,
showing the world that even as sick as he is, he's ever so slightly superhuman.
And, I
guess, he's just really into work?
Steve.
Honey.
Seriously, get some Netflix movies
and watch this one from the couch.
It's cool.
Now, on to the Gadget of the Week.
The Gadget of the Week, obviously, is the iPad 2.
It gets gets a speed boost, thanks to a
1GHz dual-core Atom 5 processor, better graphics processing, dual cameras for Facetime
and taking 720p video, and a surprisingly thin design that's also lighter.
It works on
AT&T and Verizon, and thanks to changes in iOS 4.3, it can act as a personal WiFi
hotspot.
The pricing is the same as the original hotspot, so the 16 gig WiFi only model
costs $499, and on up from there ...
and it's coming out March 11th.
Yeah.
SOON.
The iPad also got a couple new accessories -- one being a 40 dollar HDMI-out dongle,
and the other being the iPad case that shook the world.
Seriously.
People lost their minds
over this magnetic cover -- it puts the iPad to sleep when you snap it on, and wakes it up
when you take it off ...
like a parakeet cover!
Also, it folds into a little trapezoidal stand.
People went almost as crazy for the cover as they did for the iPad 2.
Go figure.
Also, Apple showed off Garage Band and iMovie for the iPad, so it now becomes less of
a pure-consumption device, and more of a media creation device.
Oh, and yes, it gets a
software option to make the switch on the side either a mute switch or a screen
orientation lock.
Yay.
The iPad 2 does NOT get a high-res display -- still 1024 by 800.
It doesn't get an HDMI
port, just the dongle, no expandable memory or SD card slot, and still no support for
Flash when you're browsing the Web.
Not that any of that matters.
I mean, Apple's on the
SECOND VERSION of the most successful tablet in history, and the nearest competitor
is like three hundred bucks more.
That, as Charlie Sheen would say, is winning.
And now for the OTHER news of the week.
Speaking of tablets, Microsoft is apparently planning to demo Windows 8 tablets ...
in
June.
JUNE.
DEMO.
Now, some might say they should just not even bother, they're so
dead in the water.
But c'mon.
That's just Microsoft.
They like to play the long game.
The REALLY long game.
They've
got their sites set on iPad 7.
You're going down, iPad 7.
Google is apologizing after a software bug left about 150,000 people with no access to
their Gmail accounts ...
and worried everything was lost for good.
Some copies of user
mail WERE deleted, and it took days to get everything back to normal.
Yep.
To the cloud ...
and the tape backups and the extra hard drives stashed in plastic bags all
over the yard.
Backup, people.
Backup.
Verizon said this week that it will end its 30 dollar unlimited data plan for iPhone
customers as soon as this summer.
Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo said they had
kept the plan around to lure new iPhone customers over to the network, but it's just not
financially feasible in the long run.
Interestingly, summer is right around the time the
NEW iPhone will probably be coming out.
Ooh, big red.
Bait and switch looks good on
you.
And finally, let's see what's clogging the tubes this week.
This week, they're clogged--and
I mean CLOGGED--with Charlie Sheen, who seems to have kicked his hookers and blow
habit and gotten addicted to media interviews.
He went on a tear on morning TV and
became a one-man quote interview -- most of the quotes involving the word "winner."
And then ...
he got on Twitter.
He's already got almost a million followers, as of our
taping, and popularized such fun hash tags as #winning and #tigerblood.
There's also a
quiz to determine whether quotes came from Sheen or Moammar Qaddafi, Sheen quotes
set to New Yorker cartoons, and a quote generator over at livethesheendream dot com.
And this being the Internet?
You know auto-tune is coming next.
Gregory brothers, I'm
talking to you.
And tThat's the Buzz Report for this week, everyone.
I'm Molly Wood, and thanks for watching.
