Deceptively Thin, Surprisingly Fast

Last Gadget Standing Nominee: Asus U36Jc-A1

Price: $999

The computing world is awash in powerful laptops. There are also more and more thin-and-light notebooks with 13″ screens. But 13″ thin-and-lights that are truly powerful? They’re still a rare breed. That’s what makes the Asus U36Jc-A1 intriguing: It looks like a typical 13-incher that emphasizes portability over potency, but it packs a standard-voltage Intel Core i5 CPU and Nvidia G310M discrete graphics. It also has Nvidia’s Optimus technology, which lets the system switch between the G310M and integrated graphics on the fly for better battery life–Asus says it can run up to nine hours on a charge.

The U36Jc-A1 has an aluminum-magnesium alloy shell, is .76″ thick, and weighs 3.4 pounds. Asus says it’ll go on sale on January 17th.

Now You Can Read a Phone Call

Last Gadget Standing Nominee: Mobile Captions Service

Price: free with phone service

When phones became smartphones, they sprouted a new feature: sizable screens. Consumer Cellular, a nationwide wireless phone company that offers service to AARP members, is taking advantage of that fact to provide a useful service: closed captions for phone conversations.

Mobile Captions Service lets the deaf and hard of hearing see a typed transcript of a phone conversation in real time as it’s going on. The captions are created by live operators on the fly based on a technology called Voice Carry Over (VCO) and are provided through a partnership with Hamilton Relay Service; the service is currently available on one phone, the Nokia E5 and is available in eight states and the District of Columbia.

Technologizer’s Prize Extravaganza: The Winners

We’ve done our random drawing and found winners for the cool prizes we offered to induce you to tell us about your favorite products of 2010. Here are the folks who’ll be getting goodies.

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Asus Pronunciation Demystified

At last, Asus has clarified how to pronounce its name (“Eh-Seuss”). Still no hope for all those unfortunately-named products.

Word Lens is Like a Great Google Audition

I’m no business guru, but from the moment Word Lens splashed onto the iPhone App Store, developer Quest Visual seemed like an obvious candidate for a Google acquisition.

Quest Visual’s iPhone app translates text in real time when held in front of the phone’s camera. And Word Lens doesn’t just give you a plain translation, it literally swaps old text for new on your screen, as if the thing you’re looking at was never in a foreign language at all.

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Kindle Magazines and Newspapers Finally Move Beyond the Kindle

Whenever I write about the reading materials that are available for Amazon.com’s Kindle, I have to remember to be precise. A very good selection of magazines and newspapers exist in Kindle form, but you’ve only been only to read them on Kindle hardware, not on the Kindle apps available for the iPhone Android, and other platforms.

Today, that’s changed–not completely, but quite a bit. Amazon has updated its Kindle app for Android to version 2.0, and the new version lets you buy magazines and newspapers, in both single-copy and subscription form.

Amazon says more than a hundred publications are available. That’s an impressive start, but there’s further to go–by my count, folks who own the Kindle e-reader have access to 238 magazines and papers. For now, the Android app’s selection is spotty (you can get Newsweek but not TIME; The New York Times but not The Wall Street Journal).

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Keep Your Gadgets Dry–and Useful

Last Gadget Standing Nominee: DryCorp DryCASE

Price: $39.99

Dry bags, which outdoors types use to protect delicate gear, are notoriously bad at letting you grab a shot or answer a phone before it’s too late.  The DryCASE–from a company that also makes waterproof devices for the medical industry, such as bandage covers–is a transparent bag that allows use of a phone or camera while keeping it dry and clean. You pump out all the air with the included hand pump and the bag vacuum-seals around the contents, leaving them waterproof. The air-tight seal guarantees that the contents of the bag will stay dry even when submerged 100 feet underwater.

EA’s iOS Game Sale Comes With Ulterior Motive

Christmas is closing in, so Electronic Arts’s $1 iOS game sale is a big deal. But as GigaOM’s Darrell Etherington argues, it’s also a clever tactic to crowd out iPhone and iPad app charts during the busiest sales period of the year.

The move rubs right up against a glut of new game launches from publishers big and small. NOVA 2, The 7th Guest, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 and a bunch of other games were all released on Thursday. Infinity Blade, published by Epic Games, launched last week. Etherington calls the EA sale a bully tactic that robs other publishers of top billing.

He’s right about sales volume, at least. Looking at the app charts on my iPad, every game in the top 10 paid app chart is published by EA. But the list of top grossing apps proves that EA’s strategy doesn’t spell doom for other publishers.

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Confessions of an Operating-System Agnostic

[NOTE: Here's a story from our most recent Technologizer's T-Week newsletter--go here to sign up to receive it each Friday. You'll get original stuff that won't show up on the site until later, if at all.]

Whenever I write about the pros and cons of Windows PCs and Macs–as I did recently for TIME.com–I make at least brief mention of the fact that I’m a happy user of both. But I’m not sure if I’ve ever outlined just why I buy and use both flavors of computer rather than settling on one or the other. Here are some quick thoughts on that subject.

First, a review of my life as a user of operating systems might be in order. For most of it, I was a single-OS user–sometimes ardently so…

1978-1982: I was a Radio Shack TRS-80 snob (thinking back, that sounds like an oxymoron, but trust me–I was one).

1982-1984 or thereabouts: I had and liked an Atari 400, but I don’t recall being passionate about it. I also backslid and did a fair percentage of my college work on…typewriters.

1984-1986: I went through an odd period during which I temporarily lost interest in computers, except for word processing.

1987-1991: I dabbled on a borrowed Mac, but I also bought a Commodore Amiga and became a–I try to avoid this word, but it’s the only one that fits–fanboy.

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Shoot Your Own 3D

Last Gadget Standing Nominee: Fujifilm Real 3D W3

Price: $499.99

I’m not sure if the world is ready to start taking photos in 3D, but Fujifilm sure came up with an attractive was to do it. The FinePix Real 3D W3 digital camera is the first compact consumer 3D digital camera capable of capturing both 3D still images and HD 3D movies at 720P resolution, thanks to its dual-CCD, dual lens system. You can view 3D photos and movies on the W3’s autostereoscopic widescreen display–no glasses required–and the HDMI output port lets you connect the camera to 3D TVs. Other features include Advanced 2D Mode, which takes advantage of the dual CCD/dual lens system to capture two different 2D images at the same time–zoom and wide angle, for instance, or two different sensitivity settings.

Tango on the iPod Touch

A couple of months ago, Laura Locke told us about a new smartphone video-calling app called Tango. Now it’s available in a version for the current, camera-equipped version of the iPod Touch. And the Android version uses the OS’s new background notifications to dramatically reduce the impact on battery life.

The Nexus S: Unadulterated Android

Last Gadget Standing Nominee: Google Nexus S

Price: $529 (unlocked)

Hey, I forgot to mention: I reviewed Google and Samsung’s Nexus S smartphone for TIME.com. (Executive summary: best Android phone I’ve seen, nice hardware, the latest and greatest version of Android in uncontaminated form–but the OS still needs more polish.)

With the iPhone, you can be reasonably confident that there will be only one new model a year–and that the current model will be the best available iOS phone. (Of course, if the iPhone lands on Verizon soon, decisions will get trickier.) With Android, things move far more quickly–there are 172 available Android handsets so far (as of last week). And a whole bunch of handsets have had the honor of being the best single Android phone to date, usually for very brief periods. To me, the Nexus S is the current best single Android phone to date–but I’m not making any bets on how long it’ll hold the title.

Chrome Beta Adds 3D WebGL Demos, Other Goodies

At Google’s Chrome event last week, the company showed some new browser features that were quickly overshadowed by the Chrome Web Store and Chrome OS.

Now, you can check out those features yourself by installing the latest Chrome beta. Among them: 3D web app demos using WebGL, sandboxing of Flash and Google Instant directly in the omnibar.

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Will ThriXXX Create Kinect’s First Windows 7 Game? Let’s Hope Not

Once the Kinect hacks started flowing, interactive porn was bound to happen.

And so we have ThriXXX claiming the first working demo of motion-controlled groping. The company plans to make Kinect compatible with all of its sex games — “Fetish 3D” and “3D SexVilla” among them — next year. A tech demo, uploaded to YouTube is already flagged as inappropriate.

Obviously, ThriXXX’s games won’t be available on Xbox 360. They’re strictly for Windows, which means ThriXXX could potentially release the first commercial use of Kinect in a PC game. I really hope that doesn’t happen.

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Goodbye, AltaVista. I Loved You Once, But I’m Happy to See You Die

If you were going to compose a list of the ten greatest technology products ever, it would be a plausible contender. If you were compiling a list of the ten greatest Web services and didn’t include it, I’d tell you your list was wrong.

It’s AltaVista–the first great search engine. Probably still the second greatest one ever, after you know who. And as Liz Gannes of All Things Digital is reporting, it’s apparently going away due to downsizing at its current owner, Yahoo. (Other victims of Yahoo’s death panel include the once-great Delicious and AllTheWeb, the bland Digg clone Yahoo Buzz, the could-have-been-neat MyBlogLog, and stuff I can’t identify, such as Yahoo Picks.)

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Apple’s Mac Store is a Go. And the Mac is a PC

Apple has announced that its Mac App Store will open for business on January 6th. It’s a close counterpart to the iPhone App Store–easy app discovery, downloads, installs, and uninstalls, and a deal that gives developers 70 percent of the profits. But the dynamics of the business may be quite different given that the Mac Store will be an additional way to acquire apps rather than the only official one. I’m reserving judgement on how big a deal it’ll be. (Actually, I’m not even sure how much I’ll use it, let alone the rest of the world.)

Apple’s announcement about the launch included the following Steve Jobs quote:

The App Store revolutionized mobile apps,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We hope to do the same for PC apps with the Mac App Store by making finding and buying PC apps easy and fun. We can’t wait to get started on January 6.

This isn’t the first time that Jobs has referred to Macs as PCs. And it doesn’t pay to read too much into canned quotes in press releases. But it’s been my stubborn habit to call Windows-based computers “Windows PCs” for years, based on the principle that Macs are also personal computers. It’s nice to see Apple–a company that has been known to bash PCs–using the same logic. To me, it’s linguistically and technologically appropriate. And who knows–Windows users might be a tiny bit more likely to consider buying an Apple computer if they look at them as an excellent PC rather than a fundamentally different, foreign device.

(I was tempted to end this post by wondering whether Jobs’ reference to PCs was a hint that the company might release an App Store for Windows PCs. But nah, it’s not going to happen…)