Latest Posts from Switched

Now that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has cracked down on the sale of Four Loko, what's there to do with all the excess product? According to an Associated Press report, MXI Environmental Services, a waste-management company in Virginia, has been buying truckloads of the caffeinated malt beverage, and will recycle it to get pure ethanol. That's right, the alcoholic energy drink that used to fuel your Saturday night can now fuel your car. About 200 trucks, each carrying 2,000 cases of the 23.5-ounce drink, will soon arrive at the MXI plant. Vice president of operations Brian Potter told the AP that, each day, MXI can process about four truckloads of Four Loko, which are bought from wholesalers that are eager to unload the banned product. MXI distills the alcohol from the drink, and sells it to fuel companies who blend it with gasoline. The company then recycles the aluminum cans, which will end up as new beer cans in about a month. MXI also recycles the drink's water, cardboard packaging and shipping pallets.

Unfortunately, Four Loko fans, there's no way to recycle the drink into a product that can repair the damage done to your body (or dignity) by such a vile and potent beverage.

We're quickly coming up on a year since the iPad was released, and while opinions may have been divided early on, there's simply no questioning now that Apple's take on the tablet PC singlehandedly made that long-failing device category suddenly viable. Apple didn't invent the tablet; it was simply the first to craft one that was compelling enough to finally win over consumers. Along the way, it has sold in the millions and become the undisputed champ, utterly crushing the few uninspired and hamfisted pretenders to the throne.

As you may have heard, this year's CES has been blandly dubbed "The Year of the Tablet" in recognition of the piles of tablets that will be crowding store shelves this year from virtually every big name company you've heard of, and many you haven't. Yet, the early word from pundits has almost resoundingly been one of mocking resignation, with the assumption that the iPad, and its presumed successor this spring, are an unstoppable juggernaut. There is some logic and appeal to that argument -- it's easy to vote for the frontrunner -- but, as Grandpa used to say, we think that's a bunch of absolute horsepucky.

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Our top 10 most popular posts from this past week:

• Glance Into the Crystal Ball of CES: Our Top Picks for the Best Gadgets of 2011
• Online Impersonations Are Now Illegal in California
• Eyes on With Samsung's Stunning D8000 TV
• CES 2011: Tablets, More Tablets and What Else to Expect
• Fake White House Christmas E-Card Swipes Government Documents
• The Vyne Lets You Embarrass Yourself and Wear Your iPhone
• 'Angry Birds' Lands on PS3 and PSP Next Week
• Police Don't Need Search Warrants to Read Texts, California Court Rules
• Facebook Flooded With Record 750 Million Pics Over New Year's Weekend
• Restaurants Now Realizing that the iPad Makes Life Easier

The Sphero, from Orbotix, is one of the toy hits of CES 2011. Like the AR Drone, the toy hit of CES 2010, you control the Sphero with your smartphone (a remote control app is available for iOS and Android). Your phone connects to the Sphero via Bluetooth, and to control the ball you can use a virtual joystick or the accelerometer (simply tilt your phone). In our brief hands on, the Sphero proved a little tough to control, but we'll chalk some of that up to the unit's dying battery. The Sphero should hit the market by the holiday season for under $100. Check out the video below.

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Though it's accepted wisdom that 2011 is "The Year of the Tablet" (we're pretty sure it falls between the year of the Hare and the Dragon), apparently someone forgot to tell smartphone manufacturers. Tablets are as common as rollie suitcases and bad skin here at CES, but what's really crushed our craniums has been the bevy of ultra-powerful cellphones. We've seen several models that will take advantage of the speedy 4G data networks that are being lit up as we speak, a bunch with high-quality cameras that rival some point-and-shooters, some amazingly crisp and bright screens, and a select few with dual-core processors that are essentially palm-sized laptops. In short, if your current phone contract is up, and your wallet full, you're going to be very happy, very soon.

The biggest breakthrough is the advent of dual-core processors in cellphones (read about them below). All of that processing muscle allows for graphics performance far beyond what you'd find in all but the highest-end netbooks and even many laptops. So while playing games and video -- including true HD, Flash and streaming -- are perfectly smooth and jitter free, there's also the ability to multitask between apps. Many of these phones are also able to capture 720 and even 1080p video and play it back via HDMI to an HDTV. Coupled with next-gen bright and big Super AMOLED or qHD screens, hardware-wise these phones are a quantum leap forward, and truly refine what we all know as smartphones.

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Our New Year's resolution for 2011? Be weirder. We have more realistic first-person shooters and self-important RPGs than we know what to do with. We want more games that evoke the singular dream-like wonder of the films of David Lynch or the music of 'The Residents.' Care to join us on our trip into the strange? Then check out this week's picks for time wasters that will leave you as captivated as you are confused.

We've spent this week delving into some truly strange games, but we have to say that this one might be the oddest of them all. 'The Thompson Twins Adventure' is a graphical text adventure released in 1984, starring, naturally, the British new wave band of the same name. While a band starring in their own video game isn't too far out of the ordinary for the decade ('Journey' enjoyed their own arcade game), it's the game's medium that is truly strange. The Thompson Twins Adventure was released as a flexi-disc vinyl that contained the data needed to play the game. First, you'd have to record the vinyl onto a tape recorder and then play the tape into a Sinclair ZX Spectrum (a popular home computer in the U.K. at the time). As archaic as it sounds, we still think this is an insanely cool idea. Sadly, The history of the 'Thompson Twins Adventure' is far more interesting than the game itself, which involves the trio embarking on a beach vacation. Thankfully, you can now play the game over at World of Spectrum. We'd suggest drowning the group by heading north from the first screen, thus saving the annals of music from the terror that is 'Hold Me Now.'

Inspired by raindrops, a German software engineer created some dazzling photographs of ink bouncing off the surface of water, a phenomenon that would normally be invisible to the naked eye. According to The Daily Mail, amateur photographer Tobias Brauening rigged a circuit board to trigger a camera shutter, and to open three valves at the same moment. Each valve drops a different color of ink into a plastic tank filled with water. At the point of impact, the camera captures the three colors coming together and bouncing off the water. Obviously, it took trial and error to capture these amazing shapes and colors with such precision. "A collision of three drops needs accurate timing in a range of a few milliseconds," Brauening told the Daily Mail. If the ink drops too fast, or the shutter opens too late, that means Brauening would end up with ripples instead of an ink droplet -- each one looking like a glass mushroom, growing out of the water.

Like Cinderella's magnificent chariot turning back into a pumpkin at the stroke of midnight, the wondrous luster of CES quickly transformed into a big, rotten vegetable as we entered Day Two. Maybe it was the fact that the whole Switched crew came down with violent food poisoning (we're looking at you, CES-provided media luncheon), or maybe it was the fact that, despite its metastasizing breadth, CES has a whole lot less to offer this year. We sipped our electrolytes and nibbled our Saltines before hitting the convention floor, determined to find the digital diamonds in the rough -- nausea be damned.

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We know you've been promised this before, so we don't blame you if you don't believe us this time, but we have it on good authority that the long-awaited Verizon, CDMA version of the iPhone will be announced Tuesday at an event back in our wonderful hometown of New York City. Word came in earlier today that Verizon would be holding an event at Lincoln Center, just days after the end of CES. Why wait till after the world's largest electronics show? Possibly because there is one company glaringly absent from the CES proceedings: Apple.

A "person familiar with the matter" told the Wall Street Journal that indeed Tuesday would bring the announcement of the Verizon iPhone, and AllThingsD is reporting that Steve Jobs will be making an appearance at the event. It's a little strange that Apple and Jobs would let Verizon take the reins on the event, but we've also heard the Apple has issued a restriction on vacation for retail employees for three weeks starting at the end of January. So will the Verizon iPhone actually be announced on Tuesday and go on sale early in February as the rumors suggest? Check back Tuesday to find out.