Sprint customers: If you’re worried that you bought a first gen Palm Pre only to watch helplessly as Palm released a better Pre on Verizon, stop. The Palm Pre Plus is essentially the same phone as the Palm Pre.

Sure, there are minor hardware differences—most notably the doubling of the RAM and the storage space—but it essentially feels like the same phone.

What’s changed in the hardware

The three most visible changes you’ll notice are the removed front button, the matted inductive-charging-capable backplate and the slightly improved keyboard.

Palm realized with the Palm Pixi that a front button was unnecessary, since it broke up the smooth finish of the face, and replaced it with a touch-sensitive button instead. It’s what the Pre should have been like in the first place. The new touch button works fine, and within a few minutes you’ll barely even miss the hardware key like you would never miss a sixth toe you never had.

The keyboard has been upgraded as well, made much less mushy with more tactile feedback when you hit a key—another lesson Palm learned from the Pixi. You’ll type faster and more accurately with these keys compared to the original Pre, even though they don’t raise up any higher off the body and their layout remains unchanged.

The Touchstone-compatible inductive backing comes standard on the Pre Plus. Palm effectively lowered the cost of their inductive charger by $20—it’s $70 on Sprint, which comes with the back, and $50 on Verizon, which doesn’t—and makes the accessory all the easier to justify buying. Even if you don’t go the wireless charging route, the matted, inductive finish makes the phone a lot classier and less prone to fingerprint smudging.

Everything else is the same

That same cheese-cutting bottom edge of the phone is still there, and the overall mold of the device is exactly what we saw with the first Pre. There’s no change in camera, processor, graphical capability or screen. And, luckily for Pre owners, the software is identical, too.

Basically, if you didn’t like the original Pre, you won’t like the Pre Plus any more than before. But if you did like the Pre and didn’t want to jump to Sprint, Palm’s graciously brought it to you.

How does it compare to the original in performance?

Both phones took almost exactly two minutes to boot up, side by side. Flicking around, browsing websites, listening to music and answering emails—in any of these routine tasks, you’d never tell the two phones apart through blind testing. However, there is a slight difference when you start getting to heavy multitasking.

The increased RAM starts to be utilized when you open a LOT of apps—I’m talking about ten or more, something you normally wouldn’t do unless you were really bored, really forgetful or really lazy about closing your apps. Once you have all these things open at once, you’ll notice that the old Pre takes somewhere between 5 to 10 seconds longer to start up new applications than the Pre Plus. While this improvement may be handy for some, the fact that the discrepancy is only 5 to 10 seconds is a testament to how well the multitasking memory allocation worked in the original Pre. Once all these apps are open, there isn’t much difference, but switching around is a bit faster.

Mobile Hotspot

While the Sprint Pre lacks tethering, Verizon’s Palm Plus includes an excellent Mobile Hotspot app that’s quite simple to use. It’s essentially the same as other tethering apps out there: Fire up the app, set a hotspot password and switch on the tethering. Any Wi-Fi device (laptops, phones) will see the broadcasted network and be able to connect to it as you would any other hotspot.

And Verizon, although not the “fastest” 3G network, still gave pretty damn good speeds when I was testing this feature—and it’s reliable to boot. The only downside is the pricing, which we’ll cover later, but having a portable MiFi that’s also your phone can be a lifesaver if you need to connect from the field.

So that’s why Palm called this Plus

There isn’t enough to call this an entirely new series of Palm phones, or even a Palm Pre 2. The Pre Plus improved on the Pre in a few important regards, don’t get me wrong, but it’s essentially the same phone we’ve seen for the last six months. You won’t notice the increased memory unless you’re a habitual window-opener, nor will you appreciate the keyboard unless you really had a problem with the previous one.

So yes, it’s called the Palm Pre Plus for a reason. And it lets Verizon customers get in on the web OS action while staying on their preferred network—which is a good thing, and actually a decent move for Palm. Rather than try to suck more money off the same group of potential customers (Sprint users) with a phone that will be a bit better but not all that different, Palm went ahead and repackaged the same phone with slight modifications to a new sea of potential users.

I suspect that this strategy will grant Palm more return on their initial webOS/Palm Pre investment, justifying the production of an entirely new phone that catches up to both the Nexus One and the upcoming iPhone 4. For Palm’s sake, it better.

Pricing

The Palm Pre Plus will be $150 with a two-year contract on Verizon, and the Pixi Plus will be $100. That’s the same price as it is currently on Sprint—even though Sprint had some deals earlier to push their Pre down to the $100 range.

But, Verizon has a special deal where you can buy either a Pre Plus or a Pixi Plus and get one free Pixi Plus after mail-in rebate, if you want to switch your family over to all Palms.

Here’s the bad. The 3G hotspot feature will be an extra $40 on top of your existing voice and data plans, and it won’t be unlimited! Verizon will give you 5GB and charge 5 cents per MB that you go over. It’s pricey, but nice to have in an emergency.

And here are the voice plans that go with. You’ll be able to buy the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus—which we didn’t review, because it’s the same exact hardware with Mobile Hotspot added—January 25.

More RAM and storage means a slightly better experience, but you might not notice it


Keyboard is improved


Hotspot tethering app is somewhat unique, since it’s officially sponsored by the provider


Still a fan of webOS as a smartphone platform, and it’s still in good shape here


Still not as many apps as Android or iPhone yet


It’s basically the same phone as the Palm Pre


Hotspot access is expensive

Background can be found here

WSJ says Apple’s been researching e-textbooks, as well as newspapers and magazines. Welcome to 2009 when we broke this story with 6 sources. But to credit, there’s a lot more. And it’s interesting.

Apple’s been talking to CBS and Disney to get a monthly TV subscription deal going, and working with EA to demo how well games would work on the tablet. The Journal also reinforces the Bing on iPhone rumor we heard yesterday, making it seem like Apple’s really taking an anti-Google stance.

Another bit we didn’t know is that the tablet is supposedly shared among various people in the house, complete with sticky notes that you leave to other people. And, with the built-in webcam (which Gruber denies) it’ll recognize you automatically. If all these rumors pan out, the tablet is kind of an all-in-one media consumption device, slurping down basically every sort of mass media humans have made since the printing press. [WSJ]

The rumored HTC + Google Chrome OS tablet might have to wait, based on HTC’s sales and marketing director claiming that the company will kill that off and focus on Android smartphones instead.

This doesn’t mean that an HTC tablet is dead forever; I bet the company is just waiting for both Apple’s tablet and Chrome OS to prove themselves first before sinking their development money into a completely new field. [Channel News via Electronista]

Poor reader Paul ordered a Nexus One and only had it for five days before this happened. No finger pointing—he said he dropped it—so just cry at the sad, broken gadget.

Paul does say that the touchscreen still works and there’s no change in the display. It just, well, looks like that. And even worse, he bought it unlocked and with a Best Buy credit card that doesn’t have purchase protection. Sorry, Paul. [Thanks Paul!]

The Newton might be in the valley between an iPhone and Apple’s upcoming tablet, but it’s essentially Apple’s first stab at the form factor. And here’s how they promoted it.

Setting aside the ’90s taint on the ad, it’s strange to see how much Apple pumped the faxing angle on the Newton in its subsequent TV spots, which we’ll be revisiting soon.

You can’t tell this is made of felt at a glance, so it would make the perfect prank on any visitors who have small children. Then again, it costs $500, and that prank isn’t that funny. [Vivaterra via Neatorama]

Even though the existence and announcement of the Apple Tablet is pretty much a lock for January 27, we still don’t know much about specs or capabilities. But it might do gaming at least decently.

Apple invited our sister site Kotaku to the event as well. Not much, on the surface of things, but because details are so slim about the tablet, small tells give us a sneak peek into what Apple’s engineers are planning.

Because the tablet’s not a phone, both in terms of computing capability and input mechanics, people are going to be expecting more from its performance. Especially in the gaming realm, which Apple has been pushing hard in their ads for the iPod Touch and iPhone. If the guess that Apple will include iPhone App Store support on the tablet is true, it’ll at least enough graphical capability to run those games.

But our guess is that we’ll see at least an Nvidia Ion-esque solution (like the Nvidia 9400M found in MacBooks), supposing the whole thing runs with at least as much power as a decently specced netbook.

Who knows though—we could be reading too much into this.

There’s still some question about whether Windows Mobile 6.6 or Windows Mobile 7 will be shown in February, but a solid tipster just told us that it will be WM7. And then he describes it.

Here are a couple things described about WinMo 7 that mesh with the rumors we’ve heard before. First, it’ll have the Natal-like gestures to be able to use the phone without touching it. We first heard about gestures on WM7 two years ago, and then sprinkled about the rumors in the past year.

Then, he says that you won’t be able to upgrade to Windows Mobile 7, because the OS actually requires you to have better hardware (faster processor, more memory, etc) and includes support for the motion-sensing gestures above.

This bit also meshes with the rumored specs of the “Zune phone”, which is basically Windows Mobile 7. From that rumor:

ARM v6+ processor, with an Open GL ES 2.0-capable graphics chip-this may be the TI3430 or the Nvidia Tegra. To show all the eye candy there will be a 3.5″ 800 x 480 or 854 x 480 pixels touchscreen. The specification also points out at other things in Pink, like 3-megapixel camera, GPS, light sensor, 3-axis compass, accelerometer, USB, Bluetooth, and full Wi-Fi support.

But then how does that account for the HD2, which HTC Russia claimed will be getting a WM7 upgrade? Because HD2 is basically the top of the line right now, which—looking at its specs—put it into the Windows Mobile 7-capable category.

So yes, it seems like we’ll be seeing Windows Mobile 7 at Mobile World Congress in February. It better be pretty damn good for Microsoft’s projection of being able to regain 25% of the phone market by 2014.

Thanks tipster!

Using a Peek lowers your intelligence by 3, and wearing three T-Shirts only gives you +1 to defense, but +20% cold resistance. [Dog House Diaries]

Lego Universe has been in development for a couple years now, but we finally got the first hands on and impressions of the MMO for both kid and adult LEGO fans. It makes building and designing Lego sets incredibly accessible.

Basically, this is the natural evolution of the Lego brand. You know how you fondly remember playing with Lego sets when you were a kid? Your kids are going to remember this.

There are two components of the game that are pretty tightly interweaved: the more traditional MMO portions where you use your skills and interact with other players to achieve goals and defeat monsters, and the building bit, where you have your own territory and can build anything you want out of Lego pieces.

Since everyone’s more interested about the building part, we’ll cover that first. Lego says you have access to pretty much every part they have, from many of the unique Lego sets over the years (pirates, space, etc.). You have your own “home” area that you can build castles or whatever inside, invite your friends to visit and customize however you like. You can also assign behaviors and actions to what you build as well, by dragging and dropping actions onto easily-connectible UI segments. It’s intuitive enough for kids, since Lego has been doing research into that segment for years.

The MMO part comes from the fact that it costs pieces (obviously) and in-game money to build, so you have to go out into the MMO world and adventure in order to earn both.

As for the MMO part, it’s similar to a standard MMO, but instead of grinding for experience, you do certain tasks in order to earn achievements (like Xbox 360’s). And when you earn achievements, you earn new items and abilities in order to access other parts—which are based on those traditional Lego sets.

Lego stressed that the game is going to be accessible to kids as well as adults, which is pretty great for parents who are looking for ways to relate to their children beyond yelling. And adults, like us, who are Lego fans, will get in on this game hardcore, making it an easy contender to top World of Warcraft in the MMO space.

This is a logical evolution in the Lego series. They already have Mindstorms, which has the programming aspect, and the set-design online tool, which lets you build your own sets and order them from Lego. Lego Universe integrates all of that into one cohesive (and fun!) product.

The best bit is the promise that you’ll be able to take digital creations you make in the game and make a custom set, complete with constructions, in meatspace. Lego will figure out which pieces are necessary to build your masterpiece, give you a price list, and ship you a custom box with everything inside. It won’t be available at launch, but it is coming soon. The game will ship in 2010. [Lego Universe]

The Nexus One is an over-hyped Android phone. But that doesn’t stop it from being the best Android phone. It is, for two reasons: Hardware and software.

Despite the buzz, it’s not revolutionary, certainly not because of the way it’s being sold—unlocked for $530 or subsidized, with a T-Mobile contract for $180. Sure, Google created its own web store that breaks the act of purchasing the device away from choosing a carrier—it’ll soon even be sold by Google for use on the Verizon network. But people have been doing this for years by buying unlocked GSM phones from Nokia and Sony Ericsson and hooking them on to any GSM provider. It’s just not the giant step forward that everyone was expecting.

Specs

Quickly, the specs. The Nexus One—built for Google by HTC—has a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, 512MB RAM, 32GB-capable microSD slot, a 3.7-inch AMOLED capacitive touchscreen display at 800×480, a 5-megapixel camera with LED flash and 720×480 video capture @ 20FPS, dual microphones for noise canceling and a trackball. There is no slide-out keyboard—everything’s done with the onscreen virtual keyboard.

On paper, those specs are impressive. In actuality, each bit has its own quirk that makes the Nexus One less than perfect and just good. The 5-megapixel camera is built by HTC in such a way that the bezel around the ring juts out noticeably from the otherwise smooth back. The bulge protrudes just enough to either scratch surfaces that it’s placed on, like your glass table or your laptop, or even scratch the lens if you’re unlucky enough to rub it over something rough.

The AMOLED screen is gorgeous, and all the colors pop to the point that it makes both the iPhone 3GS and the Droid look washed out. It’s really, really good. And it has a generous 480×800 resolution—slightly shorter than the Droid’s, but still very ample for a phone, when compared to the iPhone’s 320×480. But, again, as good as the screen looks, it doesn’t have multitouch support in the US. No matter what the reason for that is, it’s frustrating to the end user. But, on the bright side, every input you’re giving it is more responsive than on the Droid, because of the improved internals.

Design

The Nexus One is probably HTC’s best looking phone to date. The body is made up of two different materials: a metallic bezel that surrounds the front and side of the phone, which curves around to a custom-engraveable strip on the back. The battery cover and bottom of the phone are both covered in a rubbery plastic material that’s solid and grippy, yet soft and pleasant. It’s also thinner and lighter and curvier than the iPhone 3GS, and is much less sharp and masculine than the Droid.

Besides the requisite power and volume rocker buttons, there are five “buttons” on the face: one trackball and four haptic-based touch buttons. The trackball is basically useless—you’ll only use it for its color-based notifications that tell you that you have a new email, text message or missed call without having to turn on the screen. As for using it as a scrolling device, the fact that scrolling around the OS or a webpage gives you inconsistent results depending on what “element” of the screen you land on means the ball is essentially useless for navigation. However, you will have to use it for text selection, because you can’t hold your finger down to move the cursor—you have to use the ball to navigate to exactly where you want.

The four touch buttons for homescreen, back, menu and search do have haptic feedback when you hit them, but they’re not that phenomenal either. Half the time they don’t register a press when you want them to, and the other half of the time they think you’re hitting it when you just wrapped your hand around the phone slightly too far.

You don’t get a rocker switch for silencing the phone without looking, like on the Pre or the iPhone, but you can do the same thing quickly from the lock screen by swiping across the screen to the left. (Swiping to the right unlocks the phone.)

Software

The Nexus One runs on Android 2.1, which will make its way to many other phones, like the Droid, fairly soon. This means that all these great features will be available on some older phones—HTC and Moto for sure—so you may not have to buy all new hardware to take advantage of these capabilities. And take advantage you will.

As soon as you turn on the phone you’ll notice the live wallpapers, which are essentially animated backgrounds that you can interact with. They’re fairly useless, even if there are a couple that retrieve data in realtime, like blades of grass against a sky that mimics the actual time of day, or an analog sound meter whose needle moves to the music you’re playing. The other guys at Giz put it this way: There’s no reason for something like this to exist, and it sucks up your battery unnecessarily, but it might be the single coolest reason to get this phone right now.

This same engineer-driven “can we do this?” paradigm is evident in other parts of Android 2.1 as well. The photo gallery thumbnails tilt into or out of the screen as you tilt the phone, which is superfluous and fairly distracting. And the apps screen is even worse. You bring it up by hitting the apps button, which zooms the icons in in 3D. Then, instead of just quickly scrolling onto or off the screen, it wraps around as if on the surface of a cube. This would be fine if the extra 3D effect—added because they can—didn’t cause any slowdown, but it does. There’s a noticeable lag when you’re flipping up, which makes us wish Google had eliminated the effect and let you just scroll through your programs in 2D.

These effects are definitely cool, don’t get me wrong, but I’d prefer it of Google was spending its man hours on improving speed and performance (and getting multitouch on its apps) than putting in eye candy that doesn’t help usability.

But things aren’t all bad. There’s a new beta-ish version of voice recognition that lets you speak into almost any text field (the names field in email isn’t included for some reason, whereas the name field in text messages are).

Voice search works about 80% of the time, but you have to speak slowly and enunciate everything, and pronounce marks. And it doesn’t recognize some proper nouns, transcribing “Jesus” (pronounced the Spanish way) to “Hey Zeus,” Bruce Willis style. The major downside is that all the voice transcription is done in the cloud—you know, it’s Google—so you have to have a net connection to use it. It’s awesome to dictate text messages or emails, though I probably talk too fast and mumble too much for this to work well.

We’re still not big fans of typing on Android’s virtual keyboard. Sure, the keys are actually responsive now, thanks to the muscle of the 1GHz Snapdragon processor, but somehow Google’s word prediction still lags behind the iPhone’s, and gives you strange options for when you’re typing really fast on the phone. It’s less of a blast-and-forget than Apple’s virtual keyboards. And, coming from the iPhone, the keys here are spaced a bit too close together and a bit too tight, but if you actually prefer the iPhone’s style, you can download “Better Keyboard” from the Android Marketplace.

Real-World Use

It’s fast fast fast. Part of this is due to performance gains just from using Android 2.1—people who’ve hacked 2.1 onto the Droid have mentioned better speeds—but a lot of it is the 1GHz processor. Every single aspect of the phone is affected when you have faster hardware on board.

Battery life lasts around a day with normal use, which includes calling, browsing, Google Mapping, push Gmailing and clothed sexting. That’s on par with other smartphones now, and won’t see much change until we get a dramatic boost in battery technology.

T-Mobile’s 3G is decent, but not astounding. It really depends on where you are, how many other T-Mobile users are in your city and how deployed the 3G network is there. And if you want, you can download PDAnet from the Android Marketplace, and the accompanying PDAnet application for Windows/Mac, and tether the Nexus One to be a 3G modem on the go. This will work much better when the device is on Verizon—if you care to pay $30 a month to make it happen.

HTC placed two microphones on the device, one on the bottom and one on the back, for better noise cancellation. And the extra microphone pays off. The other party said that the Nexus One sounded, through their speaker, as loud as an iPhone 3G, but noticeably better. Not astoundingly better, just enough so that you’d mention it. But the speaker on the Nexus One, on the other hand, makes conversations sound tinny and thin. Actually, the better microphone setup is evident when you do a Nexus One to Nexus One conversation, because the resulting sound out of N1’s speakers is less tinny.

The speaker on the back of the phone, used for speakerphone and for speakers when playing music, is fine. Not fantastic, just fine.

The camera app loads up a lot faster than on the Droid, and shoots a lot faster than the Droid’s camera—but the image quality is similarly mediocre. Compared to HTC’s earlier Windows Mobile phones, whose cameras were passably bad, the Nexus One’s 5-megapixel camera is quite good, even if it doesn’t have the iPhone’s touch-to-focus.

What Does This All Mean?

Google’s Nexus One is the best Android phone available right now, and we’re seeing as high or higher interest in this than the Droid, which had Verizon’s million-dollar marketing campaign behind it. But, since T-Mobile’s 3G coverage (and voice coverage) is not as built out in certain areas, you might want to wait a few weeks until the phone is available on the Verizon network. (Google will sell that version, too.) And if you’re looking to buy this unlocked for AT&T, be aware that you won’t be able to use AT&T’s 3G network.

But why is Google working so closely with HTC to design the phone, and why is Google selling it themselves? Our theory is that Google’s injecting these devices into the market to make sure that OEMs are pushing forward with new Android versions, and the latest hardware available. They don’t want stagnation, like with the Windows Mobile market, and are willing to sink manpower and money into ensuring forward movement.

It might seem like selling the Nexus One directly from Google’s website is two middle fingers up to manufacturers who have been selling Android phones already. Not exactly. HTC’s still the manufacturer, and it sounded like—both from the subtext at the press event and the presence of Motorola’s Sanjay Jha—that a future Nexus Two might not be from HTC. Google’s spreading the love, essentially, to any manufacturer willing to make the “best” phone it can; one Google’s proud to attach its name to.

So What About the Nexus Two?

Google said it’s going to be a while until the Nexus Two, but “a while” probably means one year. The previous phones, T-Mobile’s G1 and the MyTouch 3G and even the Hero, don’t quite measure up to the Nexus One in terms of speed and performance. It’s really just like a little computer, so if you want to jump into Android, it’s pretty safe to do so now. Better yet, you can get this thing unlocked and out of contract for $530—keep whatever cheap T-Mobile plan you currently have—and resell it in a year when the Nexus Two is available.

Incredibly fast

Gorgeous screen

Will be on Verizon in a few months

It’s on T-Mobile (subsidized), which doesn’t have a fantastic 3G network

Unlocked, unsubsidized phone costs $530, doesn’t work on AT&T 3G

Imagination Technologies, which was responsible for the PowerVR SGX GPU chip in the iPhone 3GS, just announced the next version in the same line. Hence, this might be the next-gen iPhone GPU. And it’s a nice chip.

The PowerVR SGX545 (iPhone 3GS had the SGX535) has OpenGL 3.2 and Open CL 1.0 support, runs at 200MHz and can even do “HD” output. It can even support DirectX 10.1. Here’s the full support list:

* DirectX10.1 API support
* Enhanced support for DirectX10 Geometry Shaders
* DirectX10 Data assembler support (Vertex, primitive and instance ID generation)
* Render target resource array support
* Full arbitrary non power of two texture support
* Full filtering support for F16 texture types
* Support for all DirectX10 mandated texture formats
* Sampling from unresolved MSAA surfaces
* Support for Gamma on output pixels
* Order dependent coverage based AA (anti-aliased lines)
* Enhanced line rasterisation

There’s no guarantee that this is the chip that’s going to be in the iPhone 3GSS, or iPhone 4G or iPhone 3GVideo, or whatever, but it’s a good next step. [Apple Insider]

Mercury News found that Apple’s going to kill its downtown Palo Alto store and build a crazy one one block over. Essentially, it’s the California equivalent of a transparent NY cube, which means it has trees inside.

The architectural firm responsible for the skylights that will feed the trees inside is the same one that built that transparent cube in New York, and plans to make the store 10,700 square feet and basically make the thing sort of inside out. The point? To “[minimize] the transition from outside to inside and [draw] customers in.” [Mercury News via Macrumors]

The $199 Freescale Smartbook Tablet reference design was supposed to be the tablet design that OEMs could easily use to get a product to market fast and cheap. Maybe, but that doesn’t mean it’s very usable.

It has all the requisite hardware to be a powerful portable device:

7-inch touchscreen (resistive, unfortunately, to keep the design under $200-you’d go up to $250 if any OEM put a capacitive touchscreen on there), 512MB RAM, 4-64GB internal storage, removable microSD slot, an optional 3G modem, 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1, GPS, USB, audio ports, SIM card, speaker, microphone, 3-megapixel webcam, 1900 mAh battery, accelerometer and light sensor.

But the UI? No good. Freescale basically took a Linux build and shoved a couple apps—browser, doc viewer, gallery, media player—on top. They didn’t optimize the interface for a tablet, which is evidenced by the fact that you kind of have to use a stylus to navigate. It’s not like an iPhone or an Android where you can use your finger to swipe around a webpage, you actually have to use the scrollbars like on a normal computer.

This is the main problem with the device. It’s not customized in any meaningful way to make it a good finger-only experience. Just substituting a capacitive touchscreen for the resistive won’t solve the problem; you’ll have to completely redesign the OS in order to make the interface easy to use without having to pull out a stylus. A prime example is the onscreen keyboard: the keys are small and unresponsive, you need to manually activate and dismiss it to use. Even the JooJoo managed to get a gesture-based OS on their tablet.

There’s nothing wrong with the performance of the device: you can run 720p video decently smooth, and web pages render at an acceptable rate. But until Freescale, or one of its OEMs, puts a better OS on there, it’s basically a keyboardless computer. And the tablets of the early 2000s proved that those don’t work.

Nyko’s Wand debuted last year at CES, and this year they have something to answer the question of why people need a Wiimote AND a Wii Motion Plus separately. It’s called the Wand+.

The Wand+ doesn’t have, explicitly, the exact technology found in the Wii Motion Plus—probably because they’d get sued. But it does have “Full Motion Technology” built right into the thing, and tracks 1:1 movement and is compatible with any game that takes the Wii Motion Plus accessory. And instead of having to buy a separate device, the whole thing is in one package for just $40.

Nyko’s solution also continues their other bit of technology introduced in the original Wand, which is called Trans-Port and lets them hook up additional accessories to the Wand and passes sound and vibration signals to them. The Wand+ should launch in March 2010.

I just tried out the Fujitsu FLEPia, which has been shown in 2007, talked about in 2008 and finally released in Japan in 2009. It’s slow and janky.

The FLEPia is still the production color ebook reader available, says Fujitsu. The problem is that it’s really slow. Page turns take 1.8 seconds, and slowly loads from the bottom up. And because it runs Windows CE, the FLEPia can handle PDFs and Word documents, but they’re slow as well.

The obvious benefit is that the FLEPia is its 4096 color display, and, well, the color isn’t so hot. It’s washed out and not worth paying such a premium for. It does have a pen-based toushcreen, but it’s unresponsive as well.

So, Fujitsu should probably keep this version in Japan until they can figure out how to speed up the load times and make the screen more presentable.

This won’t be officially “announced” until tomorrow, so there’s no name or anything to it, but we just played around with Nvidia’s 7-inch Tegra tablet design that runs Android.

Nvidia says they’ll talk about the details tomorrow, but they have several OEM partners working with the Tegra, and one ready to bring it to market.

What we saw was 1080p video being played smoothly on a 1024×600 screen—lower resolution, of course, but Tegra can supposedly support TV out to a standard 1080p set. There’s also web browsing, which we didn’t see because of the lousy Wi-Fi, and the eBook reader application, which is very usable with its swipe-to-turn gestures and quick page flips.

Because it’s not a phone, it’s not clear whether or not this will get the official Google Android certification, so you might not be able to run those Android apps from the Marketplace on it. But there should be more details about this tomorrow during the Nvidia press conference. Basically, this is a promising tablet design that should be able to merge quality graphics performance with Android apps, provided it can run those apps.

Think of it like a Cliq, but with a folding instead of a sliding keyboard, so the screen doesn’t cover so much of the keyboard when it’s open.

Motorola says the guts are basically the same as the Cliq’s, so expect a performance level on par with that and not the Droid. Slower, is what I’m saying. Here’s the Cliq review to refresh yourself.

The keyboard is interesting, and each key has more surface area, but is more flush with the surface. Usually keys that are more raised to give more tactile feeling type better, and our quick one sentence hands on with it basically gave us that impression as well. But on the bright side, the flip mechanism means that the keyboard can take up the entire surface, so there’s no reaching for the keys over a D-pad like the Droid.

There’s a scrollpad on the back of the phone, underneath the screen, for scrolling around the OS and web pages with. It’s like a trackpad for a laptop, or the scrollball on the Nexus One. Not all that useful on Android, actually, unless you’re reading a very long webpage that needs scrolling.

It will have a North American carrier, but Motorola can’t say who yet. Blur looks exactly the same here as it does on the Cliq, so it’s kind of unlikely that T-Mobile will have two phones that are basically the same phone, so I’m thinking AT&T? Maybe? Update: Probably AT&T, because we SAW IT THIS MORNING. Not sure why Sanjay Jha is being so evasive when he stood in front of a 15-foot photo of it earlier today. Thanks commenters!

The DMP-B500 and DMP-B100 Panasonic portable BLu-ray players have 10.1-inches and 8.9-inches respectively, as well as Wi-Fi for connectivity and an SD card slot for photo shows. They also have a USB port, Dolby Digital, DTS HD and Viera Link, all great for keeping your toddlers—who can’t even tell the difference between SD and HD—entertained in restaurants.

LAS VEGAS, Jan. 6 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Panasonic (NYSE: PC), a major developer and contributor to the success of the Blu-ray format, introduced the industry’s only second generation portable Blu-ray Disc players at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show. Continuing Panasonic’s tradition of presenting innovative entertainment products, the DMP-B500 and DMP-B100 are designed to provide the ultimate high definition experience for those traveling, as well as serving as an additional stand alone Blu-ray Disc player for use with multiple TVs, either in the home, a second vacation home or a hotel room.

Both the DMP-B500 and DMP-B100 feature much of the same state-of-the-art technology found in Panasonic’s stand alone Blu-ray Disc players, including the PHL Reference Chroma Processor Plus technology, a proprietary technology developed in collaboration with Panasonic Hollywood Laboratory, which assures the highest level picture quality. The PHL Reference Chroma Processor Plus is a high quality image-processing technology that precisely processes each pixel of the Blu-ray Disc video signal in the vertical direction. It reproduces color data with twice the accuracy of conventional systems, resulting in faithful and sharp colors.

The B500 features an increased High Resolution WSVGA screen size to 10.1-inches, an expanded VIERA CAST internet functionality with Wi-Fi wireless LAN connection, an SD Memory card Slot that can playback digital still JPEG images and High Definition video (AVCHD), a USB port, Dolby® Digital and DTS(TM) HD and VIERA Link(TM), a technology that utilizes HDMI to enable control all VIERA Link combatable products with one remote. The B100 features an 8.9-inch High Resolution WSVGA screen, an SD Memory Card Slot for playback of JPEG images, an adjustable position screen, Dolby Digital and DTS HD. Both portable Blu-ray Disc players will be available in the Spring.

“Last year Panasonic was proud to introduce the unique and innovative, DMP-B15, the world’s first portable Blu-ray player and this year Panasonic cements its industry leadership position as a pioneer in the development of audio/video products,” said Richard Simone, Director, Entertainment Group, Panasonic Consumer Electronics Company. “This continues our commitment to provide the consumer with state-of-the-art technology that is created to enhance ones’ entertainment experience. With more people purchasing Blu-ray discs, there is a growing market for this product, a Blu-ray player that allows the consumer to view those Blu-ray titles while traveling. Plus, there is the added bonus that the B500 also provides a second player for use with any HDTV to provide true 1080p quality.”

For 2010 Panasonic’s VIERA CAST’s content, found on the DMP-B500, has been expanded to include Netflix(TM), Pandora, Twitter and Fox Sports. Viera CAST continues to offer access to Amazon Video on Demand(TM), YouTube(TM), Picasa(TM) Web Albums, Bloomberg and a weather channel. VIERA CAST is accessed via an on-board Ethernet connection or Wi-Fi and therefore does not require any external set top boxes. The service is free, though there is a charge for movies streamed from Amazon Video on Demand and Netflix. Furthermore, as additional sites are added to the 2010 VIERA CAST service, they are added automatically.

In addition the design of the B500 and B100 has been refined. With a mono-arm design, the display angle of the B100 can be freely adjusted, while the photo stand-like design of the B500 allows for comfortable positions.

The Street has learned, by way of an analyst who talked to Apple’s design manufacturing partners, that Apple won’t be using Intel on their upcoming tablet. Instead, they’re going to use chips designed by PA Semi, their own chip foundry.

It’s basically what everyone thought since Apple bought the chip company—since there haven’t been any products out yet that have used the chips. It’d be interesting to see what PA Semi comes up with for the tablet; since Apple can dictate exactly what hardware they want, it’ll definitely be more optimized than just using an Intel solution. [The Street]