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We just got all friendly with Acer’s new Timeline lineup, and while we couldn’t technically grasp at the hours upon hours of battery life they’re promising, we could definitely feel the palpable presence of longevity. The laptops are very much an interesting blance; they’re thin, but not astonishingly thin, they’re heavy for their looks (especially the 15.3-inch), and they’re styled aggressively in some ways while incredibly conservatively in others. We’re not sure we’re sold on the funky trackpad setup — the right and left buttons aren’t articulated, are sunken below the level of the touchpad, and are rather hard to touch — but we like that Acer is really embracing multitouch here. The chiclet keys have a lot of great travel to them, but the board overall felt a little cheap and “prototype-ey” — it may very well be a prototype.
Gallery: Acer Timeline hands-on

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When we got wind of Cisco’s $590 million acquisition of Flip Video-maker Pure Digital, we immediately came to grips with the fit. After all, Cisco’s been dying to pull another Linksys for some time now, and what better to expand its consumer electronics presence than with a cheap-o camcorder that’s ripe for the addition of WiFi. Bigwig (and Pure Digital founder) Jonathan Kaplan recently sat down to talk about the product’s future, and unsurprisingly, he definitely mentions the integration of Cisco’s “strengths” into the handheld camcorder. Furthermore, he’s hoping that an entity as large as Cisco can get the Flip Video line overseas, and he’s also quite big on “building the brand.” The takeaway? Don’t be alarmed when a WiFi-equipped, streaming-capable successor hits the scene at CES 2010, complete with automatic upload-to-YouTube functionality.
Source

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Sony Ericsson’s presence at CTIA this year is a rather quiet thing, but we did catch up with them at Ericsson’s booth as we were hell bent on seeing its newest, the T707. What we found was a fairly simple quad-band GSM / triple-band HSDPA set with the standard suite of Sony Ericsson features and some golly-gee gesture controls. Building on what it already does in the gesture realm we had fun setting up Chris “Amethyst” Ziegler as a contact on the phone — a necessity to assign one of 5 indicator colors to his contact — and seeing just what could be done with them. When a contact calls with a color assigned to them the exterior blinks with their color to let you know who is calling, waving your hand over the device can end the call. In the music player and games, the handset can be flailed about to control music volume or a perhaps a car in a racing game. Basic stuff, but nonetheless still a decent phone, here’s hoping a North America carrier picks this up. Pics and vid are just after the break.
Gallery: Sony Ericsson’s T707 hands-on with video

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Our time with it was all too brief, but we had just a few moments to play with a SIM-less E71x last evening — and yes, we’re pretty sure this blacked-out beauty is going to sell like Canadian bananas when it launches on AT&T in the next few weeks, especially at that enticing $99.99 price point. Anyone who’s handled an original E71 will know exactly what’s going on here: slim, sexy, totally usable keypad, and WiFi. Too bad they weren’t able to cram in a 3.5mm jack on the E71x to complement the addition of S60 3.2, but hey, we’re just going to count our sub-hundred-dollar blessings and move on.
Gallery: Nokia E71x graces us with its presence

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A flurry of news broke out over yesterday regarding the proprietary headphones required by Apple’s new iPod shuffle, and now that Monday’s here and everyone’s back in the office, some things are starting to get cleared up. For starters, both Macworld and Boing Boing Gadgets have confirmed with Apple and various third-party vendors that the new shuffle headphones do in fact contain a proprietary control chip, and that would-be headphone makers have to pay to license it from Apple as part of the Made for iPod program. Yep, that’s bad news, confirmed — but all hope for inexpensive accessories isn’t lost, as we’re told that the chip isn’t encrypted or otherwise locked down in any way, so it’s easily cloned by companies who’d rather not pay. Still, eschewing Made for iPod certification pretty much dooms a product to niche status in the Apple universe, so it’s a pretty weak consolation — when this all shakes out, we’re guessing only Apple-taxed headphones will be widely available for the shuffle, and that makes the value proposition somewhat hard to see. Just say no, people.

Read – Macworld
Read – BBG

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We’re not sure what Acer is up to lately, but this is the second slightly-revised Aspire One we’ve seen in the past few days — it looks like that rumored slimmer model with the weird hinge VGA and Ethernet ports is in fact real and headed for our fair shores. No hard specs on this mysterious stranger just yet except for the presence of the 3G SIM slot, but the model number Z68 AO530 strongly suggests that there’s an Atom Z530 lurking in there instead of the usual N270. We’ll let you know if we find out anything else — hit the read link for some more pics and oodles of FCC test data.
fcc.gov/oetcf/eas/reports/ViewExhibitReport.cfm?mode=Exhibits

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ASRock had a surprisingly large presence at CeBIT this year, so it follows logic that it would bring along some new kit to show off. The MultiBook G12 is its 12-inch offering to the bursting-at-the-seams netbook arena, and while it didn’t look all that different from the units it’s going up against, we suppose a little more competition can’t hurt matters. Details on specs were rather scant, with ASRock only telling us that it will ship with a dual-core Intel CPU, up to 2GB of DDR2 RAM, integrated graphics, a 12.1-inch panel (1,280 x 800), room for a single 2.5-inch SATA drive, gigabit Ethernet, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, audio in / out, a built-in optical drive, four USB 2.0 ports, a 56k modem, VGA output and a fancy-ish design on the lid. The on-hand rep wouldn’t give out a hard price to quote, but he did say that it would be priced “very competitively” when it ships worldwide in the April / May time frame.
Gallery: ASRock launches MultiBook G12 at CeBIT, we go eyes-on

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Navigon had a shockingly large presence at CeBIT this year, and considering just how many issues these Europeans seem to have with following directions, we weren’t at all surprised to find it among the most crowded booth at the entire show. Needless (and harmless, might we add) jabs aside, the firm had a number of its latest GPS units up on display, and while the model numbers (and software, obviously) were a touch different than the US models announced yesterday, the hardware was definitely the same. We really dug what we saw, too, as the curvaceous, thin designs really caught the eye and the LCD displays were all bright and easy to read. If you’re hungry for more pics, you know where to look.
Gallery: Hands-on with Navigon’s newest GPS units

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