Loaded: Happy DTV day, sort of Video

Loaded: Happy DTV day, sort of Video Transcript

>> Mark: We have news from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona the transition to digital TV is kind of happening and while you probably shouldn't use a certain iPhone app in the casino. It's Tuesday, February 17th, I'm Mark Licea and it's time to get Loaded. ^M00:00:13 [ Music ] ^M00:00:21

>> Mark: So today is the day, sort of, February 17th was supposed to mark the official transition to digital over the air television but after a series of congressional yeses and no's congress chose to give stations the option to delay their digital transition to June 12th in a bid to give consumers more time to make the switch. While hundreds of stations across the country have opted to keep today as their transition day. So all you tech heads out there expect a lot of calls from grandma about why she can't get The Price is Right. The Mobile World Congress started in earnest yesterday and CNET TV was on-hand to deliver you first looks at the latest and greatest mobile devices. Last week we mentioned Garmin and Aces were teaming up to deliver the M20, take a look.

>> Ken: I'm here at the GSMA World Congress in Barcelona to show you the Garmin-Asus nuvifone M20; this is one of the newer nuvifones, probably won't be out 'til the first half of 2009, no release availability as far as carrier, location or when it might come to North America or the U.S. but can show you that it does offer a pretty small design; this is a touch-screen phone so there's no keypad or keyboard, it's pretty thin on this side. It does come in a few colors you can see here it's a little bit of a pinkish red color, it also comes in a blue and a black. Few of the features, of course it does have the maps [phonetic], it's gonna have the music player, also has a 3 megapixel camera, has organizer features, it is a Windows Mobile 6.1 phone but it actually has an overlay which is called Glide, which makes the Windows Mobile interface a little more user friendly, a little nicer to look at. I'm Ken German and this is the Garmin-Asus nuvifone M20.

>> Mark: For more first looks at the mobile phones that are being showcases at the Mobile World Congress head on over to CNETTV.com or for the latest news on this show check out News.CNET.com. There were also a few notable mentions from the event, first up, Palm announced the Pre along with a slue of other Smartphones are in the works to run Flash the iPhone, of course, not being one of them. Palm had teased that the Pre would offer Flash support at CES but now the company has made it official, Adobe announced that Flash Player 10, which is the full PC version will be available on Windows Mobile, Google's Android, Nokia Symbian and the Palm's webOS. The devices are expected to roll out early 2010; this could possible mean that designing apps for the Pre would be a lot easier than they currently are for the iPhone but we'll see if the possibility of Flash and the iPhone becomes more of a reality by the end of this year. Samsung also released word on a solar-powered touch-screen model made from plastic water bottles. And finally Microsoft gave a little preview of its latest version of Windows Mobile. Version 6.5 has a lot of new enhancements to its previous version like a backup and restore service that they're calling MyPhone, an app store, and an improved web browser to name a few. The new honeycomb style user interface is supposed to make navigating easy but so far nothing too ground breaking from Microsoft. YouTube might be taking measures to prevent users from downloading video the company announced last week that they're in the works to offer downloads for a small fee. Well, looks like YouTube may already be taking steps to discontinue video downloads from third party sites; these are sites that can pull the video from YouTube keeping the initial quality intact but we've recently experienced download issues, myself included. Not too surprised though I think YouTube has been under a lot of scrutiny with copyright issues so this may be their effort to remedy that as well as monetize their content. If you live in the good old state of New York Governor Patterson has some bad news for you the state is proposing a 4% tax on online video to help close a 15 billion dollar budget deficit and yes that includes online video pornography, I'm just saying. However, if you're an avid online shopper like most of us it may or may not occur to you that we are supposed to pay taxes on the stuff that we purchase online. Consumers that buy goods from an online retailer out of state are supposed to pay a use tax but many of us just don't pay and a few states go out of their way to actually collect the money. Considering that this accounts for an estimated few billion dollars a year and the budget deficit is just a tad bit more than that we can expect this year to be the one where Congress passes some sort of legislation to make collecting this kind of tax mandatory, bummer. Skype announced a deal with Nokia to preload their voice over IP software onto the new N97 later this year. Pundits including myself have dreamed of official VoIP calls on mobile phones it looks like it's actually really gonna happen. Users will be able to call Skype to Skype on their N97 for free over WiFi and 3G the address book will show users who are logged on for Skype calls, in addition users will also be able to make Skype out calls so you may be able to forego those expensive cellular plans. If you recently downloaded the new iPhone Card Counter app and you plan on maybe using it at the table during your next trip to Vegas you might want to watch the movie Casino it might help shape your decision making just a tad on whether or not you actually want to rip off the casinos.

>> What are staring at you bald headed Jew prick? [background noise]

>> Mark: Apparently the app from TMSOFT has already generated buzz and just so you know the casinos are well aware of it. Now card counting isn't exactly a felony in Nevada but the use of any card counting device is which is why an app that you think may be your ticket to a brand new car could potentially get you thrown in jail, maybe missing a few fingernails or whatever it is they do these days. Those are all your headlines for today Natali is back tomorrow so until next time I'm Mark Licea with CNET TV and you've just been Loaded. ^E00:05:35