UPDATE: Lenovo has taken issue with the timeline laid out in this post. Lenovo says its LePad Slate wil ship in China in Q1 and other Android slates will be available in the U.S. in 2011. The Windows Slate, pictured below, has not been officially announced, and may or may not ship. “There isn’t an expected date for this since it is a concept,” said a spokeswoman in email. In addition, the Notion Ink tablet just started shipping.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2011 — I just walked out of a big Panasonic press conference where journalists swarmed all over the company’s just-announced tablet, but executives spent just three seconds discussing it.

That’s because Panasonic’s Android-powered Viera Tablet won’t be available till the end of the year.

End of the year? That’s 12 months away. By then, Apple will be selling the iPad 2, which is likely to be a blockbuster if it follows the same sales pattern as the second-gen iPhone.

Same story with Android tablets from Lenovo (end of the year), Asus (three Android tablets with first-half-of-the year ship dates), Notion Ink (no ship date), and Hewlett-Packard (as-yet-unnamed WebOS tablet promised mid year). In fact, Hewlett-Packard never shipped the tablet that made headlines at last year’s CES after Steve Balmer announced it at his keynote.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2011 — I guess a strange product collaboration with Yao Ming was somewhat entertaining to hear about (don’t you want Yao Ming headphones??), but my ears didn’t really perk up until Monster brought out their Tron inspired iPhone dock and headphones.

According to a post on Apple Discussion forums by user addcore AppleCare suggested a fix for the occasional problem where an external monitor attached to a MacBook Air would flicker. However, the fix doesn’t seem to be a complete cure, but according to addcore, ” I’ve seen two tiny instances which is a major improvement to the every thirty sec flickering. ”

So not completely cured, but better. Read on to find out how this was accomplished.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2011 — Pioneer launched its SmartCradle for the iPhone at its CES presser today, further proving that the aftermarket auto industry seems to be embracing the iPhone with rapidly increasing gusto.

They really pulled out the stops on this one, hardware-wise: a dedicated GPS receiver with an external antenna, which they said will give even newer iPod Touch models GPS capability; an accelerometer and gyro sensor for better location awareness; hands-free calling an integrated amplified speaker with the ability to vary volume based on ambient noise; and audio/video output. Of course, it’ll also charge the iPhone; Ted Cardenas, Pioneer’s director of marketing, made of point of this — but since the iPhone won’t last long with location services going, any dock even remotely similar already includes charging ability. Nary a whiff on price or availability yet.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2011 — Fittingly for a line of music accessories bearing the name of reggae legend Bob Marley, some of the product components are made from hemp.

The carrying pocket for the House of Marley earbuds, for example, are made from hemp fibre, a spokeswoman told me. Bob Marley famously used hemp for something else, of course.

The House of Marley launched a range of about a dozen music products here at CES, including a boombox, iPod speaker dock, and several headphones and earbuds.

It’s not just hemp; the products are made form a variety of eco-concious materials, including recycled plastic and aluminum.

They also sound pretty good. At least, they did in the cavernous press hall. The twin-speaker boombox pumped out a pretty hefty sound — but it’s impossible to give anything a proper listen at CES.

A portion of profits goes to 1Love.org, a charity supported by the Marley family.

Pictured above is Bob Marley’s son, Rohan, wearing a pair of Marley cans. Here’s some pictures of some of the other products:

LAS VEGAS, CES 2011 — Intel gave a detailed look at its next-generation Sandy Bridge chips that will likely make their way into Macs in 2011.

The chips boast four cores and integrated graphics processors that improve image-processing performance and power-management, according to Intel.

The new chips are up to 800% faster than the current generation Core Duo chips used in most of the MacBook line today. The chips are 60% faster than high-end i7 chips used in top-of-the-line iMacs and Mac Pros.

Made with a 32nm manufacturing process, the chips boast an incredible 1.16 billion transistors apiece.

“That’s a big number,” said Intel VP Mooly Eden, who walked a packed CES press conference through several benchmark tests showing off the new chips’ processing power.

Several PC companies here at CES unveiled new machines powered by Sandy Bridge chips, including Lenovo. Apple is usually several months behind and will likely introduce the new chips in the spring at the earliest.

During the preview event, Intel’s executives were extremely bullish about the Sandy Bridge line, portraying it as the biggest product launch in the company’s recent history.

The Sandy Bridge line comprises 29 chips that will find their way into more than 100 different “desktops, laptops and everything in between,” said Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini in opening remarks.

The most important addition to the chips’ architecture is the integrated graphics processor, which outperforms 45% of discrete graphics cards on the market today, said Eden. It certainly looked pretty impressive, displaying and streaming 1080p HD streaming wirelessly from a laptop to a connected TV; and conjuring up a 3D avatar of Eden that he said could easily be inserted into a game in realtime.

We start the day off with an assortment of bargains. first up is a new batch of price cuts from the iPhone App Store, including “Drake’s Tower,” an action game. Also under the spotlight is a deal on Apple’s touch-sensitive Magic TrackPad. Finally, were you one of the many who received the new iPod nano for a holiday present? If so, there is a wristband case to keep your tiny tunes close.

Along the way, we also check out a deal on Xserve servers, a 70 percent off deal on iPad cases, and software to control your Mac’s WebCam. As always, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

A vendor of iPad cases usually wouldn’t create a ripple in the tidal wave of products announced daily from the CES floor. However, Dexim is making headlines by displaying a case reportedly designed for the unreleased iPad 2. The case looks similar to one for the original iPad, with some subtle differences.

Along with a magnetic bluetooth keyboard that attaches to one of the case’s flaps, the product reportedly features a thinner design (matching rumors), openings for a front and rear camera supposedly for the expected Facetime support, and a large opening in the back.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2011 — Now you can monitor your blood pressure on your iPhone or iPad, thanks to a new health-oriented accessory from Withings.

Withings’ Smart Blood Pressure Monitor is a $129 arm cuff that makes it easy to monitor your blood pressure every day, away from the doctor’s office.

“It’s much more accurate to test at home,” said Withings spokeswoman Carole Lavault.

“Twenty five percent of the worldwide population has hypertension,” she added.

On show here at CES, the system looks dead easy to use. Just wrap the sleeve around your arm and plug it into your iPhone/iPad’s dock. Hit the onscreen button, and the sleeve inflates/deflates to measure your blood pressure. That’s it; nothing to give you a heart attack.

Combined with a free app, the sleeve can record months of blood pressure data, which can be shared electronically with health care professionals.

Withings also makes the WiFi Body Scale, a net-connected scale, which can also send weight data to the blood pressure app.

Here’s a picture of the iPad app in action:

LAS VEGAS, CES 2011 — Joby released two new iPad stands yesterday. One borrowed from their line of bendable camera tripods, the other was more unusual, and took a page from the Japanese art of origami.

The GorillaMobile Ori ($80)  for iPad is made from a material called Hylite — a blend of aluminum and polypropylene — which felt pretty light and is supposedly super-tough. The origami-inspired design gives the case an intricate look (so many cutouts) and allows for a continuous hinge that can adjust the viewing angle to practically any position within its range. it’s also equipped with a swivel hinge that allows the iPad to be easily switched between portrait and landscape positions — or even turn the iPad into a steering wheel for racing games. Pretty cool.

Apple announced Wednesday it will open the Mac App Store Thursday, Jan. 6, the latest addition to stores already available for the iPod, iPhone and the iPad.

“Enter the same iTunes password you use to buy apps on iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. And within seconds, your new app flies to your Dock, ready to go,” the Cupertino, Calif. company noted.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2011 — Still a day to go before CES is officially at full steam, we found a few nuggets at a Tuesday night press event.

First up is a pair of solar-powered goodies from Eton. The Soulra 2 is the pumped-up version of the original Soulra dock (which was featured in our 2010 Holiday Gift Guide). It’s got eight speakers, a massive flip-up, high-capacity solar-panel providing eight hours of tunes on just five hours of charge, and a facelift — we think it looks much more refined than its predeceessor.

The free video transcoding tool HandBrake was recently updated to version 0.9.5. HandBrake is one of my favorite Mac OS X apps that works with another app called VLC to rip and convert videos for your personal use. The application hasn’t been updated in a long time. However, the update was worth the wait since the application has improvements that include library updates, improved subtitles, AC3 encoding support, enhanced presets, and  universal audio downmix support. A complete list of improvements can be found here.

One interesting milestone was the addition of BluRay disc structure support, but unfortunately decryption isn’t supported yet.

The Mac OS X version of HandBrake saw several good GUI improvements: a new Audio Panel that supports more than four audio tracks, VLC is automatically detected, and you can run multiple instances of HandBrake at the same time. However, Mac users lost PowerPC (PPC) support — this version of HandBrake only supports Macs with Intel processors.

Finally, the developers via a standard Apple-like statement declared that “Many Bug Fixes and other small improvements” were included in this update.

Get your copy of HandBrake for Mac OS X on Intel Macs in 32-bit and 64-bit versions. The 64-bit version of HandBrake requires the 64-bit version of VLC. If you are still using a Mac with a PPC you can still get version .094 here.

Tablet sales are expected to more than double in 2011, not so much due to first-time buyers, but from upgrades. The iPad could follow the trail broken by Apple’s iPod, creating a brand-loyalty that lasts for years, one analyst reasons.

Of the 24 million tablet sales projected this year, growing to 44 million by 2015, “the lion’s share will be iPads, despite many would-be competitors that will be released at CES, we see Apple commanding the vast majority of the tablet market through 2012,” Forrester Research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps said.

Apple has been granted its first patent related to Liquidmetal, a space-age metal alloy. But the patent isn’t for a new iPad enclosure or iPhone antenna, as experts have predicted. Instead Apple’s Liquidmetal patent is for an internal component of a fuel cell.

Apple’s new patent describes “amorphous alloy” collector plates for fuel cells, an electrochemical battery that uses hydrogen to generate electricity. Although the patent doesn’t reference the Liquidmetal trademark, the material is an amorphous alloy or “metallic glass.”

Last year, Apple signed an exclusive agreement to use the Liquidmetal Technologies’ IP in consumer electronic products. But of course, the ever-secretive company hasn’t hinted at its plans for the material. The possibilites are endless. Liquidmetal is a super lightweight, high-strength, scratch-proof metal that NASA says is “poised to redefine materials science as we know it in the 21st century.”

Scientists who helped develop Liquidmetal have previously predicted that Apple will use it to build the next iPhone. So why is Apple interested in fuel cells?

Proving that news embargoes and electronics trade shows attended by tens of thousands of people do not play well together, word of Blue Microphones’ new Yeti Pro USB microphone leaked from the desert Tuesday night as the giant Consumer Electronics Show began picking up steam in Las Vegas.

The highly anticipated successor to Blue’s successful, top-of-the line USB microphone, Yeti Pro is the first USB mic to combine 24 bit/192 kHz digital recording resolution with analog XLR output, making it potentially one of the finest, most versatile recording tools on the market.

Like its predecessor, the plain old Yeti, Yeti Pro features premium condenser capsules set in Blue Microphones’ proprietary triple capsule array, which supports four different recording patterns for capturing a wide range of recording situations.

Yeti Pro looks quite promising from here, an assessment shared by CES judges, who made Yeti Pro a 2011 CES Innovations Winner in High Performance Audio. The mic is set to retail for $249 and should be available at authorized Blue Microphone distributors later this month.

LAS VEGAS — Griffin revealed something really cool today: a sensor that hooks up to your car’s diagnostic computer and feeds all kinds of info to your iPhone. Griffin calls it the CarTrip, and it attaches to your car’s OBD-II sensor (the thing car mechanics uses to diagnose problems), collects and stores the data, then sends it to your iPhone (we’re not sure how, because the press release doesn’t say), which then displays the data in realtime with the help its free partner app, CleanDrive.

The app/hardware package will reveal all kinds of information, like fuel consumption rates, acceleration, and it’ll interpret diagnostic codes. It’ll also display a “Carbon Score,” so you can figure out how much you’re befouling the planet by driving around.

CarTrip should be available in early 2011 for $90.

Update: CarTrip is equipped with Bluetooth for relaying the data to an iPhone. Thanks Levi!

LAS VEGAS — After hours of driving through the cow-infested flatness of California’s Central Valley, CultofMac Editor Leander Kahney and I have finally arrived in Vegas, primed to report from this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. The doors only officially open on Thursday, but here’s some of the sparkly new stuff we saw released today that we’re mega-pumped to get our hands on at this year’s show:

Here’s more evidence that the iPad is a day-to-day computing device, not just a media consumption toy.

Silicon Valley supergeek Jack Dorsey says he’s using his iPad for most of his computing needs.

“90% of my computing is now on the iPad (with a keyboard dock),” Dorsey said on Twitter. “And I love it.”

Dorsey is the creator of Twitter, and serves as the company’s chairman. He’s also the CEO of Square, a startup that turns the iPhone into a personal credit card terminal.

It’s not all roses though. There are a coupe of things Dorsey says he can’t do:

“Only thing I can’t do are big presentations & code,” he says.

We start with free and discounted iPhone applications, led by dueling weather apps. In the free corner is “The WeatherApp,” which provides weather alerts and updates. This is just one of the entries in the latest crop of freebies from the iPhone App Store. In the “discount” corner is “WeatherNow,” a weather and clock combo once sold for $4, but now yours for just $0.99. This is just one of several iPhone apps being offered at discounted prices.

Also on tap is a deal on Apple’s AppleTV. The 160GB model is going for $120. Along the way, we also check out various ways to keep your iPhone powered-up, as well as insured from spills and drops. There is also a deal on an OEM version of a Mac OSX update and other Mac software.

Like always, details on these and many other bargains can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Android reportedly may soon not be the monolithic threat it once was. The operating system codenamed “Honeycomb” from Google reportedly will be optimized for tablets, creating two tiers for products. The first tier will be using the first-gen Android, originally designed to compete with Apple’s iPhone. The second tier will use Android 3.0, require more powerful chips, and be aimed at the iPad 2.

As a result, some earlier Android-powered devices, such as Samsung’s Galaxy Tab, may soon be obsolete. But does it really matter? Surveys find most iPad owners use their tablet for checking email, surfing web sites, and keeping up with their social media contacts.

A company called Ten One Design has announced a $25 joystick for iPad called Fling that attaches to the screen with suction cups.

The Fling goes on top of the on-screen controls, and replaces your direct finger or thumb. The joystick is mostly clear plastic, so you can see through it.

Does this defeat the whole purpose of using an iPad for gaming, which is direct touch on an elegant surface? Or is this just cool?

Fling is available for pre-order Jan. 6.

We all may have started 2011 with a New Year’s resolution, but Apple seems to have found the best way to get started on the right foot. The Cupertino, Calif. company gained $6 billion in value on the first business day of 2011, pushing the iPhone maker to a market capitalization of $302.32 billion.

Monday, investors rewarded Apple for its long string of popular electronic gadgets with a 2 percent jump in the stock’s price at $329.57 per share. If breathing down the neck of Exxon, history’s most profitable company isn’t enough, there’s even better ahead for Apple, if you believe Wall Street analysts.

2010 was the year of the hot Apple auctions, with an Apple 1 fetching its highest price ever, $213,000 to an Italian collector.

What’s next?

Cult of Mac’s own Adam Rosen, a Mac consultant whose vintage mac museum collection counts some 36 different models and about 75 total computers, was asked to opine for AntiqueWeek on the going prices for some popular Apple collectibles.

New features have quietly been introduced to iTunes movies that allow users to search for specific words within a film’s script, and select their favorite clips to share with their friends through social networking sites. The features are being “quietly tested” in recent movies released by Sony Entertainment Pictures, as noted by PaidContent.org.

The movies that are known to include the new features at present are “The Other Guys,” which provides users with a search button enabling them to enter words to be found within the film’s script; and both “Salt” and “Resident Evil: Afterlife,” which include the “clip & share” function that allows users to select their favorite scenes and then share them with their friends through social networking sites. Users also have access to a playlist of songs from the movie and an opportunity to purchase them from iTunes.

The introduction of these new, iTunes-only features gives movie fans an incentive to purchase the latest films through Apple’s iTunes Store, rather than on DVD or Blu-ray. According to PaidContent.org, the capabilities found in the latest Sony movies are unique to iTunes, and not just a repackaging of additional content available on the Blu-ray or DVD counterparts:

“Mind-blowing add-ons? No, but they do represent the intent of studios like Sony, which declined comment, to offer differentiating value on digital platforms from that on DVD, where extras are often nothing more than a collection of additional short videos.”

These new features are only accessible to users who choose to purchase movies from iTunes, rather than rent them.