Author: Jason Chen

Nintendo’s president Satoru Iwata was more mouthy than most presidents are about their upcoming, but unannounced, products, and said that the upcoming DS will have an accelerometer. Or, some kind of motion sensor.

Here’s the quote:

[It will have] highly detailed graphics, and it will be necessary to have a sensor with the ability to read the movements of people playing.

The highly detailed graphics part is a given, but even so, is still pretty vague. It does mesh with the Nvidia Tegra rumors we heard back in October. The people’s movements part is a bit more interesting. Maybe some kind of accelerometer for tilt-based gaming (like in smartphones now) could be interesting, but unintrusive enough for it to still be a DS. [Kotaku]

Superphone. If you weren’t reading our liveblog of the Google event, it’s the term their Android team kept using to describe the Nexus One. But why?

It bugged us so much that I had to ask for clarification. After all, what kind of person makes up a new term for smartphones and expects other people to use it? I mean, c’mon right? Google’s official answer is that because of the 1GHz processor, the high amount of RAM, the Google apps and all the software innovations they’ve made in the Nexus One, the phone is one step higher than smartphones. And it’s almost equivalent to the laptops you were using four or five years ago. But…really? Superphone?

Because what happens in a few years when these phones are going to have quad-core processors, Xbox 360-level graphics, 4G, and screen resolutions that are on par with what you’re currently using on laptops in 2010. What then? Super super phones? It makes no sense.

The worst bit is that Google is actually serious with this superphone terminology. One of the presenters said something like, “the superphones of today are going to be the smartphones of tomorrow,” which basically implies that superphone is just a high-end smartphone. So, smartphone will be fine. A phone doesn’t cease being a smartphone just because it’s a few years old—but it will cease being a superphone because it’s not top of the line anymore.

Yeah, let’s drop this now and stick with that name that other jerk came up with.

Like we said in the hands on, this is the best Android phone right now. And since we know you can’t get enough photos of a gadget you’re pining for, here’s a huge gallery.

Other than popping a Verizon version in Spring 2010, Google really didn’t throw any surprises our way. So all the impressions we’ve got in our hands on still apply. Head there to see details about how the phone works and what we think.

Then, visit our visual guide to Android 2.1, and everything you need to know about the Nexus One.

Google’s Nexus One: The Google Phone. It’s being unveiled officially right now. We’re here. Here’s our liveblog page.

Check in bright and early to see what’s coming, and see whether the leaked pricing details are really true, and whether anything’s changed since our first hands on back in December. [Liveblog Page]

Watch it live here:

Live video by Ustream

Now the WSJ is quoting people “briefed by the company” as stating that the 10 or 11-inch Apple Tablet will be shipping in March for $1000, but will be announced at the January 27 event this month.

To familiarize yourself with the rumors so far, not including this one, head to our giant rumor page.

According to the WSJ, the tablet will be pretty much what we expected: movies, TV shows, games, browsing, books, textbooks and newspapers. WSJ also mentions two different material finishes for the tablet, and if we know Apple, they’ll only have one; the two are just final prototypes so that Jobs can decide which one he likes more.

So it’s good to hear that at least some of the rumored features might be delivered, but that $1000 price seems a bit high. Not high as in we think it’s wrong, high as in cost-prohibitive-MacBook-Air-style high. [WSJ]

Freescsale, supplier of the chip that powers the Kindle as well as about 70% of the ebook market, has just developed a 7-inch tablet reference design that will basically be the genesis of many tablets starting 2010. And it’s $199.

Now, to be fair, those two figures are a bit preliminary. The $199 figure is the one quoted by Freescale, not the final price that OEM companies that will buy this design from Freescale and put their own spin and customization on it will charge. And, although Freescale says this tablet design will allow companies to bring the tablet to market in as low as 6 months, customizations (hardware or software) and bug killing will undoubtedly inflate that.

Even if only on paper, this Freescale reference design is pretty damn promising. It’s powered by a netbook-esque ARM processor, a 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. Whether or not including all these options in a build will result in a machine that’s less than $200 is unclear, so there might be some sacrifices that need to be made.

As for the OS, it’s primarily browser based, but the root of it is a customized Debian Linux build, so you could theoretically go and install Linux applications onto it. But, as a tablet, people are mostly going to be consuming media, so going with a browser, like the JooJoo did, makes sense. Freescale did come up with an interesting $50 keyboard docking station addon that you can keep at home and use as an input device if you actually need to do some typing, so it’s kind of the best of both worlds.

The bottom line is that Freescale has made a pretty enticing design, and if a decent enough OEM picks it up and gets it to market at under $200, it could be the start if a very interesting computing category—one that’s a step higher than smartphones but a step lower than netbooks.