CES 2012 round-up It’s digital Christmas! For the tech industry, January’s Consumer Electronics Show is more exciting than waiting for Santa to come down the chimney: it’s when the big names of consumer technology show off their biggest and best products – and by “biggest” we mean “smallest”, because this year thin is in. Tech firms usually boast about power or pixels, but this year they sounded more like supermodels who haven’t eaten anything but air for six months. Take LG, for example: its 55-inch OLED TV wasn’t remarkable for its screen size, but for its thinness: it’s just 4mm thick, which means it’s thinner than any of LG’s phones. Marc Chacksfield has an important warning, though: “it’s not as light as a phone”.
Best apps for docked iPads and iPhones As wonderful as they are to use, iOS devices need pretty regular care and feeding to stay in tip-top operation. Despite Apple’s advances in battery life and reductions in power consumption, the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad all need electricity to work.
Pocket Lists ( $2.99 ) is a fully featured to-do application that has recently appeared in the App Store. Though a number of other GTD apps are already available, the reasonable price, design and feature-set of Pocket Lists makes it something rather more interesting that just another run-of-the-mill to-do application.
8 brilliant gadgets that totally failed to launch What would an alternate universe look like where Microsoft dominated with a slick newspaper-ready tablet, HP had won the smartphone wars, and we were all carrying around a Palm Foleo? Well, it’d certainly be one that is not quite so Apple-centric.
The photo sharing and manipulation app for iPhone, Instagram, has been named as the iPhone app of the year by iTunes as part of its Rewind 2011 highlights of the year. Instagram, which boasts over 11 million users, is a free app that allows for filters to be applied to photographs to give them a retro, film appearance. Photographs can also be instantly shared to Facebook, Twitter and a range of other social networks.