Loaded: Happy New Year! Video

Loaded: Happy New Year! Video Transcript

>> Welcome back and Happy New Year. We're gonna catch you up on all the news from the holidays today plus Macworld rumors and our plans for covering the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. It's Monday, January 5, I'm Natali Del Conte and it's time to get Loaded. ^M00:00:15 [ Music ] ^M00:00:18

>> LG is launching a new line of TVs this week that can stream Netflix movies without a box. The TV itself has network capabilities. No extra hardware required. They'll be on display later this week at CES in Las Vegas. LG will also have a new line up of Blu-ray players that will have the ability to stream YouTube and Cinema Now videos in addition to movies from Netflix. The other thing I am especially interested in from LG is the Dick Tracy watch. Now that's of course not the official name, but it describes it so perfectly. It's a watch that can take not only 3G voice calls, but also 3G video calls. I need this. I don't know why, but I do. Unfortunately, I won't get one unless I steal it because it isn't supposed to launch here in the US and no, I wouldn't really steal it. I might ask Mark Licea to, though. Lenovo is beefing up its netbook offering. The company is adding multi-touch and facial recognition to the IdeaPad S10. The screen will also get a bump in size going from 10 inches to 10.2 inches. It will cost $349 and be available in March. The company also launched a new mid-sized laptop series called the IdeaPad Y. It includes a 14-inch, 15.6-inch and 16-inch notebook with 16 by 9 aspect ratio up to 500-gigs in storage, 4-gigs in memory, surround sound, multi-touch, facial recognition and then video graphics cards. These are hefty machines, but they're reasonably priced all under $1200. We will of course be on the look out for them in Vegas. Panasonic Japan announced a fax machine that functions without paper. The KX-PW608 will be available in Japan this month and it allows users to use the built-in keypad to type messages. You can also send documents straight from your computer to someone else's fax machine. Faxes can be read and forwarded to a computer straight from the screen saving the trouble of a print-out. But isn't the purpose of a fax to give someone a hard copy of something like a loan document? And if you're not printing it out isn't it's just an e-mail? We're looking forward to Kodak's version of the Flip MinoHD. The Kodak ZX1 will also be on display this week at CES. It's high definition at 720p and it records up to 10 hours of video with the flash card up to 32 gigs in size. That is significantly more than the one hour the Flip MinoHD can handle. It's also cheaper. It cost $149, while the MinoHD is $240. Unfortunately, it won't hit shelves until April. Poor, poor Microsoft Zune it had a bad New Year's. Zune users woke up on New Year's day with frozen devices due to a glitch in the software. Apparently, the glitch had to do with the fact that 2008 was a leap year. That's a pretty remedial programming mistake -- embarrassing! The problem is supposed to be fixed now, but if it isn't you can find the instructions on how to reset your Zune at zune.net. The iPhone is not immune to software issues either. In fact, a hack is now available for the 3G iPhone. It's called Yellowsnow and it opens the iPhone to other carriers and non-approved uses of the operating system. Now, I usually avoid Yellowsnow and I think I will continue to avoid this one. I don't see a need to hack my iPhone and I'm a wimp about breaking the warranty. I'll leave that to Brian Tong or Tom Merritt. Speaking of Apple let's get to the Macworld rumors -- rumors always fly when Macworld comes around, but they have been pretty subdued this year. So here's what we've got, my friend Cali Lewis from GeekBrief is sticking with her regular prediction of New Cinema displays, I'd like that. There's also a rumored product Red iPhone which I doubt, but would very much like. Actually no, I like my white iPhone because it looks like the gadget that Vesper used in Casino Royale. As for iMovie there are rumors that it will get an update that will focus on the, oh so elusive cloud. Computer World says that there will be some heavy focus on Internet video either working as a web application or closely with a web application. That would be cool! And finally, Apple Insider is reporting that there is a 17-inch MacBook Pro on its way with a fixed internal battery, in addition to a new version of the Mac Mini both with chipsets from Nvidia. Of course, we can't substantiate any of these claims, but we won't have to wait very long to find out what's what, one more day and counting. China has approved the use of 3 wireless 3G standards for the Mainland. The government had originally sought to avoid royalty fees to the internationally accepted 3G standards and instead foster home grown 3G data standard. It looks like they've have a change of heart though because the country will now support WCDMA and CDMA 2000 standard in addition to its own RTD-SCDMA standard. China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom will get licenses early this year. Those are your headlines for today. Tomorrow is a travel day for us because we're heading to CES, but we will have a special show for you tomorrow and then we'll be broadcasting Loaded from Las Vegas on Wednesday and Thursday. In addition to Loaded the CNET TV crew will have more coverage than you can handle from CES, but I dare you to try. Stay tuned to CNET TV all week and you'll see the best of the best and the not so great as well from CES and Macworld of course. And I'll be twittering about the whole ordeal, so please follow along there twitter.com/natalidelconte. I will see you soon. Thank you for watching. I'm Natali Del Conte with CNET TV and you've just been Loaded. ^M00:05:39 [ Music ]